The Ricochet Podcast - NRI Ideas Summit: The Influence of Popular Culture

Episode Date: May 3, 2015

Adam Bellow, HarperCollins/Liberty Island, Rob Long, National Review/Ricochet and Jeremy Boreing, from Friends of Abe discuss the influence of popular culture on the political process on the political process and conservatism. Source

This is the kids' table, but it really shouldn't be. We're going to talk a little bit today about the culture. And just to start off, let's just roughly define that big umbrella term, what that means. We're going to say it's academia, we're going to say it's Hollywood, we're going to say it's news, we're going to say it's new media, Facebook, Twitter, music. Pretty much anything that you can experience now on your phone, in your pocket, counts as part of the culture. And our side talks about a culture war, losing the culture war, trying to win the culture war. We sort of spent a lot of time complaining about the New York Times.

We spent a lot of time – I mean, my good friend Ann Coulter, I don't know why she does this, but she watches MSNBC pretty much wall to wall. Yeah. Unlike a lot of people on our side who complain and whine about the fact that the culture is dominated by liberals, we actually work in film and television and publishing, which is dominated by liberals. And yet we manage to do our work to derive creative satisfaction, to do what we feel we want to do. I actually am interested in hearing from you guys about your experience in the film industry, because my role in publishing is very defined. I publish books for the conservative audience. Now, the way I got into that position

is that when I started out nearly 30 years ago, there were not any conservative books being published in mainstream publishing. There was only Regnery, which is a sectarian press outside of the mainstream. And for the first 10 years of my career as a book editor, we were really sort of fighting an uphill battle. It was trying to get attention for these books, making sure that the books were the best books that we could find. We made them as good as we could make them. We tried to meet a very high standard.

And there was a great deal of resistance in the media, in the press, and in the publishing industry, and in the machinery of our – in the building itself. And yet over time, gradually, as we proved that we could make money selling conservative books, the industry came around. And so now there are no fewer than four dedicated conservative nonfiction imprints in publishing. And editors all over New York are happy to publish the occasional conservative book. Okay. For the sake of diversity. Right.

Well, I'll say, in 94, 95, I did a National Review Institute event, and it was 20 years ago. And my joke was, I come from Hollywood, where if you're a Republican, you're conservative, you're really alone, but the good news is that statistics recently reveal that one out of three Hollywood Republicans goes on to become president of the United States. And that was kind of true at that time. But now Friends of Abe is enormous. 2,300 members. 2,300. 2,300 nameless faces in Hollywood. But I have to say, of the 2,300 people who are nameless, who shall go nameless, there are names that you would know and faces that you would recognize. That's absolutely true. And, you know, really, I think Friends of Abe, even though we're very private, obviously, even you and I in this setting won't talk about the names of the people who are members.

It's actually had an impact on the culture, even just the culture within Hollywood. You know, we host these new member lunches about once a month where we bring 20 new people into the organization. And I've probably hosted maybe three dozen of these over the years. And in 2008, 2009, 2010, you'd be at these meetings and people would weep. You know, grown men would be affected by being in a room, and what they would say was almost always the same. It was some version of, I've been working in this industry for 20-some-odd years. I never knew that I had ever met another conservative.

I've never, to my knowledge, been in a room with another conservative. Occasionally, people would say, my wife does not know my political beliefs. Now, you don't hear that so much in Hollywood. Now the typical new member of lunch experience is that people will say something along the lines of, I knew this existed. I've heard rumblings about this, but I never knew if I knew anyone who was in it.

I didn't know how to access it. And so just that change in what people are bringing into the room I think represents a difference. And the other thing is in these lunches we hear horror stories continually about what actually goes on in the industry, the way that conservatives are treated on set, the kinds of things that – better than any of us here – that film and television sets are actually very political places. It's almost like the one thing everyone has in common is they hate George W. Bush and they want to save the whales, and that's almost their calling card. For me, it's the opposite. I hate the whales.

Two things, yeah. But it's almost their ethical calling card because it's an industry sort of not known for its – Well, what's interesting on a set, the way a production budget is written is what they call the above-the-line number, below-the-line number. And the above-the-line number is all the fungible, the fancy people, the writers, directors, actors, and that salary can go up and down. That number can be anything. But the below-the-line, it's pretty much those are hard costs. You know what they are. Fifteen days of shooting costs X amount.

If you hire five camera operators and this and that, those are fees that are pretty much set in advance. And on any given set, and I mentioned this once to a friend of mine who's extremely liberal, on any given set, below the line, 100% Republican. Above the line, God knows. It's like they fight it out between Ralph Nader and whoever else is running. And I once said this. So I said, doesn't that make you – how do you explain that, I said to this guy?

He said, well, it's because they live way out of town and they've got to drive all the way in. They commute for like an hour. They listen to that talk radio, that rush, and it gets inside their head. It bores inside their brain. By the time they arrive at the set, they're completely radicalized on the right. Which is exactly, that is an extremely aristocratic, elite way to look at it. That the little peons are, you know, they're brainwashed by Rush. And that is the hardest thing for us, right? Probably the hardest thing for you, is to break into the culture and say, people who are on the center right aren't stupid. That the books they write for Adam Bellow aren't illiterate.

That the movies they make and the television shows they produce aren't trash. How hard is that? So you've created a market in books, but do you think there's a market in films for this? Well, I'm encouraged by what you've done in the book industry because no one has yet tried to create a conservative alternative in film. We've seen it in books. We've seen it with Fox News now in news media. We've seen it. Actually, conservatives are very, I think, prominent in new media.

We own the Internet thanks to people like Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart and others. But no one yet has tackled entertainment, film, and television. Part of the reason is just it's so cost prohibitive. I think that it's obviously going to be the last frontier. And the other part is that I'm like a lay minister, and every now and then a grandma will call me and say, my grandson is moving to Hollywood, and I heard about you from your grandma. And will you help him understand how not to lose his soul? And I sit down with these guys, and they always say some version of, you know, I just want to do good work and just sort of reclaim Hollywood for Jesus.

And I always say, oh, buddy, Jesus was never here. Yeah, that's very good advice. I think it bears emphasis that the idea that bringing more conservatives into Hollywood is somehow going to change Hollywood is mistaken. Hollywood is always going to be Hollywood. That's right. Exactly right. And even those Silicon Valley billionaires will come down to Hollywood

because they've got a better way. And everybody in Hollywood says, yes, yes, right this way young man, with your better way. Is there a better way to come up with a billion dollars we can spend? So that is the way that Hollywood works. But what you've done is you've created a parallel structure. What Murdoch has done is create a parallel structure and that's what we can hope for. Say more about that.

That's one of the things I sort of despair of with our side is that we're conservative, right? All conservatives want to go to the top. We want to go to the CEO. We don't want to spend our time in the little people. If we want to change something, we want to go – I want to be on the front page of the New York Times. I want to be on the CBS Evening News. I want to be in all these sort of establishment organs.

I don't know why we bother. We can create our own, can't we? I mean, for my part, a ricochet, people said for years, where's the conservative NPR? As if we needed to buy Radio Spectrum to do that. Well, it's right here. They're podcasts.

And we're doing it, and we're not asking for permission. Well, I think what I'd like to point out is that the thing that made it possible for conservative views to be published out of the heart of the mainstream publishing industry is that we didn't do it unaided. conceived beginning in the 60s when a number of visionary institution founders and builders created a set of institutions, think tanks, foundations, newspapers, magazines. This was necessary because conservative policy thinkers weren't able to be employed in mainstream universities, so they had to have someplace to go. So AEI, Heritage, Cato, places like that.

And so I came along at a point where that project was sort of cresting, was really kind of beginning to flower. And the subsequent development of alternative media, talk radio, cable television, internet. Without that institutional support, conservative ideas, even today, we wouldn't have been able to create that mass market, that mass audience. That supports now books like Peter Schweitzer's Clinton Cash, which I'm just releasing. I can't imagine being able to publish that book 20 years ago at HarperCollins.

I love that book. Even though Rupert Murdoch does own the company. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah. So, I mean, so I guess my point would be, if we want, if by culture we're going to talk about popular culture, which by my definition includes not just the nonfiction side of the conservative enterprise, but the fiction side. The stories. Yeah just the nonfiction side of the conservative enterprise,

but the fiction side. The stories. Yeah, the right-brain side. Something like that effort, I think, is needed, desperately needed. And I think the problem that we have as conservatives is a tendency to think that the free market will take care of everything. And that wasn't the case for the culture war enterprise as I have known it. And I'm a product of it, and I've spent my entire life working in it.

And without that effort to develop, it had nothing to do with the free market at all. It was a group of guys who got together and said, this is a good idea, we should just write it. We need to make an exception, I think, in our free market thinking where popular culture is concerned. And the reason that I say that is because that has always been the case. Art has always been subsidized by the wealthy.

There wouldn't be a single painting in existence as a result of the market because it's not a fundamentally commercial enterprise. In the same way that we understand as conservatives that there is a place for non-profit organizations like Heritage Foundation or others, we know that there's a kind of work that isn't necessarily a product of the market, but that the market needs to subsidize. If rich people hadn't paid painters to paint pictures of themselves that made them look 15 pounds thinner throughout the centuries,

there'd be no such thing as visual art. And really, film and television are the same. We can't get into a long discussion about the economy of the film industry. But even today, I know Tom Cruise flies private jets and makes $20 million a picture. But this isn't really a for-profit industry in the way that anyone in this room would understand. Yeah, I mean, if only a business manager, an accountant at the Clinton Foundation, would really understand Hollywood economics. Because they're essentially, it's a little bit fraud,

a little bit hopeful thinking, and then a whole lot of just kind of smudged numbers. But can I push back on that a little bit? Because, like, I write comedy for a living. And I can't imagine anything worse than sitting down to write a conservative comedy. That just fills me with dread. I mean, you know, unless the price is right, obviously.

And I would say this because the generation of Americans that grew up watching the sort of more family-friendly, anodyne sitcoms of the 50s, Leave it to Beaver, they ride it in the streets in the 60s. And the generation that grew up watching All in the Family, which was supposed to be this progressive sitcom, but I think actually was secretly very conservative, they grew up and voted for Ronald Reagan. And Norman Lear's been apologizing for All in the Family for the rest of his life.

Right, because the hero of All in the Family was supposed to be the anti-hero, Archie Bunker. But everybody who watched the show said, well, he's the one with the job. He's the one bringing home the money. He's the one who actually fought in World War II. He seems like a great American. Maybe a little kooky in some things, but seems like a great American. Meanwhile, he's surrounded by these leeches. Or maybe I just didn't get it. So what would that be? And I say this as somebody who's a little bit personal, because every now and then I read certain conservative writers will write something and they'll describe something that I've done and they'll say, well, of course, typical liberal Hollywood.

I wasn't trying to do that. I was just trying to write a funny joke about guys drinking beer in a bar. How would you do that? How would you – Well, what we have going for us is that all stories are fundamentally conservative. And I would argue that Hollywood in some ways still services our values. It just does it in spite of itself. They have to tell conservative stories because those are the only stories that anybody will pay to see.

They made 13 movies about how the Iraq War was a murderous crusade for oil. One of my favorite statistics – I think it was redacted. Sometimes I forget because they all run together and they have kind of self-righteous names like that. One of them, though, actually made $20,000 at the domestic box office. $20,000. And the one that made the money? American Sniper. American Sniper. Which people in this room may not realize. It's not just that it made the money.

It is the number one R-rated box office success of all time. Second place, Passion of the Christ. That should tell us something. But it actually should tell us two things. One, there's an appetite for stories that have our values. And two, we don't have to make G-rated movies to make conservative values in art. Passion of the Christ is as hard an

R-rated movie as there's ever been. It's almost unwatchable for its violence. And American Sniper is a legitimately R-rated film as there's ever been. It's almost unwatchable for its violence. And American Sniper is a legitimately R-rated film as well, and yet they're carrying our values out to people who would never watch a rerun of Leave it to Beaver, for example. So is that just sort of a, are we being malign, conservative, or prude, so that they want sort of sanitized, family-friendly entertainment that no one else wants to watch?

Well, I want to, I can address that, but I also want to respond to the question you raised. So I agree. I don't want to consume a bespoke conservative popular culture any more than I want a bespoke conservative intellectual culture, which I have had to contend with a lot.

I mean, it's very typical, for example, for me to come to Washington and go to a think tank and talk to a research director or a publications director who's telling me what various fellows are working on. And he'll say, well, we have a monograph on the Mexican economy. Would HarperCollins like to publish that? And my response to that is, who paid for that? And why? Because there's no audience for it. And if you had asked me in the first place, I would have told you that. We could have spent your money on something else. So I completely agree that we don't want to sort of create a kind of a hothouse culture that

can't exist outside of a little bell jar. That isn't appropriate. The better response is to say it isn't up to us. You know, I think a lot of the discussion that goes on on the right about popular culture takes as its starting point the assumption that there isn't any such thing as a conservative popular culture and that we have to think about how to make it happen. And that sort of, so we started out this conversation, you know, prior to this getting on stage talking about what Andrew Breitbart liked to say about, you know, how politics is downstream

from culture. And that has been taken by people on the right to mean that there isn't such a thing, that we said it would be a great idea. Yes. You know, we should have that. And, you know, my experience from my own, you know, perspective as somebody who works in publishing is that for a long time there wasn't any conservative literary culture anywhere in sight, and now there is. It's a product of the advent of certain new technologies, the ability that people have. People, I think, have been inspired by the ability to self-publish

to try writing. And so I have discovered that there is a large body of conservative fiction writers who have just, in a way that I find actually very moving because of the quixotic hope that they embody, that they're writing and publishing their own books and hoping to be discovered just like anybody else. The problem that they have is that there's no theater system. Like on the left, here's a big example in theater. A great example, Tony Kushner, the author of Angels in America, was in his 30s an aging wunderkind

who had never really done anything. And then he received a prestigious Whiting Writers' Fellowship, which is given out every year. And that put him on the radar. It gave him sort of cultural cachet. And then he was able to get funders and investors. And Angels in America was put up on Broadway. And, of course, if anybody here has seen it, it's a highly political show, which Ronald Reagan is the great enemy.

And weirdly, the great hero at the last scene is Mikhail Gorbachev. It's great to read it because you realize, good lord, he says something like, I think perestroika is really going to work out as the curtain comes down. Unintentionally funny. That's right. Go ahead. So that would be my suggestion is that not that everybody who is not everyone, every conservative or libertarian who decides to write a joke is going to become George Carlin, but that we need to create a market and an environment that's supportive,

begin to create an audience for this, just as conservative policy ideas needed to have an audience created for it. We can do that. It's what's encouraging to me about the sort of evangelical films that are coming out now. I'm not encouraged, frankly, by their quality. And I'm not even, I don't even find myself really in perfect alignment usually with the ideas they're trying to communicate. But there is something really refreshing about how entrepreneurial the venture is. There was no such thing as a Christian film market.

But a group of people who understood that you have to create supply before there's going to be demand started creating these evangelical films. They did it at a very low budget, I mean, an unbelievably low budget, $100,000 movies, $50,000 films, $500,000 films. And they found a way through ingenuity to create a market out of thin air that didn't exist before. Now, if one of those films comes out, it can very consistently have a $30 million box office when there was no audience for that only eight years ago. I think we can do something very similar. I do want to say one of the reasons that you find these authors, I would think, who are writing conservative fiction goes back to what I was trying to say a second ago, that story itself is conservative. And this is what works against Hollywood. We all know that whatever your personal feelings on the matter notwithstanding, there's an amazing phenomenon to observe is the shift in American

attitudes toward homosexuality and how it directly correlates to the Will and Grace success on television. I mean, we went from a country 15 years ago where a super majority, over 80% of people, thought that homosexuality was fundamentally wrong to a culture now, 15 years later, where a majority not only thinks that homosexuality isn't wrong, but supports gay marriage. I mean, that's probably the greatest shift in a cultural value in human history, and there's one TV show responsible. That's an outlier, obviously. But what I would say is that with the one exception of the sexuality of the characters,

Will & Grace is a conservative TV show. It's a buddy comedy, yeah. Modern Family is one of the most conservative television shows that we have on the air right now. Also one of the best written and best produced shows that we have on the air right now. And why? It's not because the people who are writing it are conservative. Although there are a few, just to let you know. It's because in order to tell a compelling story,

you have to engage the fundamental values of reality, and the fundamental values of reality are conservative. When people watch things that are overtly leftist, it doesn't resonate with them as true, and they have $20,000 box offices. I want to add something and make a distinction that we haven't touched upon yet, at least in terms of literature and the narrative arts. There's a distinction between what I would draw between elite culture and popular culture. The kinds of stories that you're talking about, which are inherently conservative, derive from the great sort of 19th

century literary tradition, adventure novels, romance, ghost and pirate stories, the stuff that I grew up reading, Tarzan, you know that stuff. And somewhere in the early 20th century a division emerged in the literary world and a kind of a high modernist movement emerged that rejected all that kind of, that sort of conventional narrative. And that's what we have now. We have our elite literary culture. It doesn't tell those kinds of stories.

When you get to the level of what we call genre fiction, thriller, mystery, historical fiction, then we see again and again those narrative conventions in which good triumphs over evil, fundamental values are reaffirmed. A couple of big movies, a couple of big books, The Hunger Games. The question really here is what do you think of these movies

that usually pit young people, idealistic people, against some kind of government behemoth. Would you look at that and say, well, that's a conservative viewpoint right there? Well, I can tell you one thing. The left is very upset about it. So it must be good. So it must be good, yeah. I read a very funny article in The Guardian, which is a very left-wing London newspaper,

by an English novelist, complaining about the popularity of The Hunger Games and Divergent and The Giver, which have sold hundreds of millions of copies all over the world to teenage kids. And he's a socialist, and he says, this is terrible. This is all this anti-nanny state stuff. What should we do? What should we do about it? He said, well, I don't know. We can't have censorship, but don't let your children read these books. Well, all right. So this maybe goes back to your original point that there is a counterculture.

There is a conservative counterculture. It's there. There are green shoots everywhere. They just need to be watered by an audience and a certain amount of philanthropy. And by a shift in opinion. And it and it's a subtle shift but important, because you bring up Hunger Games and say, what do you make of that? And I would say that one problem that we have

on the right is that because we know that Hollywood is against us, and because even though films may be fundamentally conservative, the moments of liberalism are so glaring.

I like to use as an example the Star Wars prequels, which I think are George Lucas's apology for having made the great American conservative fiction called Star Wars, which is maybe the most conservative story ever told. But he makes the prequels, and he actually has, I think, the Emperor Palpatine say to young Darth Vader, young Darth Vader says, you're either for us or against us. And Emperor Palpatine or Yoda says, only a dark lord would think this way. And it's funny because they're obviously directly quoting George Bush and calling him a dark lord of the Sith.

But what they didn't realize is that George W. Bush was directly quoting Jesus. So the implication is pretty – George W. Bush was a light worker. They didn't realize that. But nevertheless, so those moments are so offensive to us when they happen. And the tendency among conservatives is to push back and just reject culture. We'll find other things to do. We'll watch Fox News.

We'll read some books. We won't watch TV. We won't watch movies. And what we've done by doing that is we've taken our dollars out of the marketplace where they can't support the art like Hunger Games that does exist. And the other problem is that when we see a Hunger Games or a Harry Potter, both of which are incredibly conservative, we tend to not like them because we're so predisposed to think that art is against us that we reject it.

I'll hear Christian parents say, I can't let my kids watch Harry Potter. I mean, there's no such thing as trolls and wizards. And as our mutual friend Andrew Clavin likes to say, there's no such thing as talking lions either. It's fiction. What we should do is take a step back and actually examine the art. And if you do, you'll find that Harry Potter is the classic hero's journey, which, if you'll indulge me for a moment, is the story of America, is the

hero's journey. It's the most popular story ever told in all of Western literature. It's everything from the story of Christ to the story of Arthur to the story of Star Wars and the story of Harry Potter. And it's the young man descended from kings, descended from a greater generation, but the world has lost its wisdom. It slipped from a time of wisdom into a time of darkness, a time of the Galactic Republic into a time of the Galactic Empire. And only if this young everyman, this young individual,

this young farm kid from Tatooine, only if he manages to touch the shadow of that ancient wisdom can hope and progress be restored to the galaxy. And that is our story. Our story is the story of a republic almost lost.

And it can only be restored if we touch that ancient wisdom, if we remember the wisdom that our fathers sold out. Because the generation that bore us gave in to the dark side. They believed the promises of the emperor. They believed the promise of collectivism. They believed the promise of the all-powerful state. And when you watch Star Wars in 1977, I wasn't alive. Some of you were. But we

all know what happened, right? People sat down in the theater and a tiny little ship breezed across the screen. And a second later, the entire screen is filled by the all-powerful state. And you knew immediately which side of that battle you wanted to be on. And one of the biggest leftists in Hollywood made that movie. That's why there is hope for us. But we do have to vote with our dollars. We have to support art. I haven't heard a thing you've said since you made the crack about not being a live historical.

I took you little shit, is what I wanted to say. No, but I understand. But if you did, conservatives wouldn't buy art. Exactly right, but I understand. All right, so let's forget the fancy stuff here. Let's talk about popular culture. Mike Judge. Mike Judge made probably, I think,

the most outwardly conservative TV show ever, King of the Hill. Hank Hill was a conservative. He was an out Texas conservative. And everyone else around Hank Hill was a lunatic. And it was a way to make fun of popular, politically correct culture. And then he goes on to make another movie, which is flawed, but is shockingly conservative, called Idiocracy.

The theory being that in 25, 35, 40 years from now, in the future, everyone's just so stupid that the civilization is barely held together by duct tape. Because, of course, politically correct notions and this kind of soft culture that we all hate has taken root. And now the very subversive Silicon Valley. And now the very subversive Silicon Valley, which is really a story, incredibly accurate story of raising money from venture capitalists. For a comedy on HBO, there was about 11 minutes on Sunday, last Sunday, maybe not last Sunday, Sunday before, where the perils of evaluation and liquidity preference were part of the story. And where you see that the biggest of big business is not conservative.

It's a bunch of pre-describing environmentalist elitists who actually use their money and their goodwill to accumulate personal power. I think that's the greatest advantage. So is that conservative, or is that crypto-conservative? Are we sort of hiding? It's counterculture. There you go. The greatest advantage that we as conservatives have today in the cultural sector is that the liberal counterculture has become the establishment,

and every establishment breeds a reaction. So it's going to be largely libertarian, I think, and conservative, because the thing that liberals don't have is a sense of humor. Boy, that's true. I mean, it could be said about conservatives too, and it has been, but there's nobody more humorless than an elite leftist. And it's easy to make fun of them. And the easier to like Gwyneth Paltrow with her conscious uncoupling, everybody was laughing about that all across the Western world for

two or three weeks. And she didn't even understand why. Why am I so funny? And that's funny. That's funny, yeah. You could get a lot of mileage out of that. There's a new play on Broadway called Hamilton. Have you seen Hamilton? I hear it's great. I haven't seen it. It's a hip-hop musical inspired hip-hop. I know Rick Rukeyser has seen it probably three times. Rick here? Still off Broadway, coming soon to Broadway, about Alexander Hamilton. And it apparently is extremely effective.

I would love to have been in the – I don't know if they do this for plays – in the pitch meeting. It's about Alexander Hamilton. Wait, but it's all hip-hop. Wait, wait. As the investors are getting ready to go. Yeah, I heard you. Is that a good sign? I mean, here's what strikes me about the American culture right now, popular culture.

The number one miniseries of all time was Hatfields and McCoys. Bestsellers on the bestseller list of fiction are American history stories, killing Lincoln and killing everybody, but also young adult fiction is deeply rooted in American stories. Why are we interested, and of course American Sniper and other sort of American history stories being told on the big screen, are we going to that in popular culture because we no longer

teach that in school? Are those American stories just not part of the intellectual, I don't know what it is, curriculum? That's a good point. And is that a good sign, or is it going to be subverted? Culture, of course, is a vacuum. If you leave something on the ground, someone is going to pick it up,

especially something valuable. And certainly, as somebody who works in publishing, I know that stories about American presidents, American history, great military figures, always popular. There's still a very... I guess what I would say, one observation I would make

is that the problem with popular culture today is not so much that it's liberal. It's that it doesn't take any pride in America. There's no... There's nothing positive about this country being broadcast by any sort of mass organ of popular culture. And that's something that the American people miss. But is this a market failure? Because I'm in the television business, and I look at this market, and I think, boy, if I had a couple billion dollars, I would buy a satellite station

or a cable station and I'd make it the America Channel. And I used to have TV shows about America, American stories, miniseries, dramas. We'd turn on AMC. We're going to be eating at Mount Vernon tonight and George Washington is a hero on a miniseries on AMC

and he's watching. It's really gripping. It's about the spies of the Revolutionary War. Sometimes't know if anybody's watching, it's really gripping. It's about the spies of the Revolutionary War. Sometimes it's a little slow, but it's really interesting, and it's popular on that network. I don't know why someone isn't... Yes, it is a market failure.

It's a market failure. It is a market failure. Why? Because our side doesn't want to jump into the fray? The people in that market apologize. I mean, you know, Duck Dynasty, the most popular show in the history of cable,

and A&E actually tried to pull it off the air. Right. lit the most successful show in the history of cable because it's those redneck Christian hillbillies who pray at the end and vote for George W. Bush and don't want to have sex until they're married. Nobody wants, I mean, that's a humiliating. So the people who are in that market, they still produce the content, but they're ashamed of it. And the people who are outside of the market who have the dollars to make the kind of play that you're talking about have heard because every person, I mean, probably everyone in this room who could afford to be part of the president's circle or whatever it is to get in today, probably has been hit up by someone for money to make a movie at some point in your life, if not see me after in the hallway. See me first, if you wouldn't mind. I have a bigger picture to sell. Go ahead. So people have been taken advantage of because, you know, people in the movie industry are sort of well-known for being vultures who turn large fortunes into much, much smaller fortunes.

So I think that people are afraid to take that step. But, yes, it's a market opportunity, 100%. Do you think it's a market opportunity beyond books? Well, yes. I mean, that's my premise. I mean, I think that it's my bias as a publisher to think that books are more important than anything else. Sorry. And what are books again?

I can whack you across the back of the head with one. Maybe that will wake you up. And I think it's still true that a great deal, not all, but a great deal of our visual culture is driven by books. That is, first a book is like The Hunger Games came out of a book. Divergent, The Giver, these were all books. Lord of the Rings were books. And so that they're popular to their appeal is proven first. And I understand this because there's a lot of money tied up in a movie.

You know, you don't spend $300 million on a movie unless you're really pretty darn sure. It's like toothpaste. I'm not going to manufacture 50 million tubes of toothpaste until I've done a lot of market research and I know that people are going to buy it. Books are, we fail with books all the time. And that's the privilege of being in publishing. The story proving ground. Yeah. We can afford to fail. So I think what is needed maybe in the visual culture area is the cultivation of sort of a safe space for failure. Go ahead. I think there's one other aspect of this that we should talk about, and it's the intersection of culture and politics. And I think one thing that would really help people like the three of us would be if our politicians would actually champion conservative values.

Because I find that – I think that the most destructive show of the last 10 years – a lot of people would say it's Jon Stewart because young people get their news from Jon Stewart. Far more destructive, though, is Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report. And the reason is because in Hollywood, and I think in high schools across the country, people don't know that they've ever met a conservative. And since they don't think they've ever met a conservative, because they're constantly in the echo chamber of hearing that conservatives are racist, bigoted, homophobic, warmongering, you know, greedy bastards with binders full of women who want to put y'all back in chains. And we're really only three of those things. But since they hear that constantly, they don't know that they've ever met a conservative. They don't know that a conservative is actually the guy standing right next to them

working just as hard as them, the guy raising their kid. And this is, Friends of Abe is proof of this, that people's own wives don't know that they're conservative and they're afraid that they might find out. And then Stephen Colbert comes along, and he reinforces the stereotype. He says, this is what a conservative is. I am a conservative. I speak for conservatives. And he reinforces every bad thing that they think about us. And then our own politicians get up, and they run away from our values.

They have them, and maybe they'll vote this way, but we want to find a way to not sound so conservative. We want to find a way to not champion these values. And the result of that is that when someone watches The Avengers, for example, which was one of the most libertarian movies ever and one of the five most successful films of all time from any genre, and they see that, they don't know that what they're hearing is what Ronald Reagan thought. They don't know that what they're hearing is what maybe Ted Cruz thinks now, because that's not what they think Ted Cruz thinks. They genuinely think that what Ted Cruz thinks is that we should ship black people back to Africa

and not pay people to mow our yards. And since our politicians won't champion it, there's never a connection. Movies, I would argue today, you just said you can't fail in movies. And that's true. The result of that is we live in a weird moment in Hollywood right now. I won't get into the economics of it, but where studios make far fewer movies than they used to, and the movies are far more expensive. Blockbusters cost $150, $250, $350 million. The result is the movies are becoming more conservative because Hollywood knows I can't spend $350 million on a movie and not have anybody go see it. I can lose money on Redacted, but I can't lose money on The Avengers. But they're being conservative with monsters instead of conservative with something else. We're not watching Reagan biopics. We're watching a guy in a robot suit go fight the

totalitarians who want to literally control the minds of all the people on earth. And no one sees that that's about conservatives versus liberals because nobody in our political class will just say they want to control your mind and give themselves power. We are the little farm boy from Tatooine. So is there a market opportunity there? I mean, Friends of Abe, I would posit, could not exist before email had been invented and probably before even Facebook. And certainly before you and I bravely became the two outlawing members. Exactly, the only two.

But it wouldn't have existed. How powerful is new technology? And I will posit this. I feel like new technology is really the future for us. The barriers to entry are zero. The upside is huge. You can reach 100, 200, 300, 400,000 people really quickly. That's good news for us, right?

I mean, we're supposed to be championing entrepreneurial capitalism. There's this incredible Dodge City of media going on right now, wide open, and why are we not jumping in? Well, we are jumping in. I think that's the news that's missing. The news that people on the right have not heard, that I have taken it upon myself to make sure they do hear. Which is, again, it's not up to us to create the counterculture. It's not our idea sitting here cooking it up and congratulating each other on being so visionary.

Although we are. It's actually happening. The technology that has become available now is empowering people who never previously would have even considered writing a book, making a video,

creating an animated short, composing and recording a song. And this is, believe me, this is happening all over the country. And it's not so much that there are barriers to entry, it's that there's nothing to enter. There is nothing for them to enter into. There's no marketplace. There's no distribution system. There just isn't anything there for them. They are a counterculture. And, youulture. In the 60s and 70s, there was Mad Magazine, National Lampoon, spontaneous organs that

arose to give voice to that outsider perspective, that challenging Abbie Hoffman type of energy, which I think we need more of on the right. Yeah, and we need people, we need the audience. We need conservatives who understand that there is an actual battle going on for the culture. We need them to relax a little bit when we try to create culture. But what do you mean by that?

I mean that conservatives will always tell me that they don't watch movies. I mean this is the thing I hear all the time when I go around the country. Well, I don't even watch movies anymore. I don't even turn on the TV anymore. But that's not true. Of course they do. They go home and watch Modern Family just like everybody else in the country. But they don't want you to know that they engage that.

And I think it's like – I'm not Charles Krauthammer. I have no background in psychology, and my IQ is probably about 20 points lower than his. Maybe more. 20 to 25. 20 to 25. I don't know where I am on the bell curve, but we should talk later because you probably – but what it is is that conservatives actually engage. I mean conservatives watch Game of Thrones like everybody else, but they're embarrassed to be found out that they do. And so they don't want

to engage. Here's the problem that I've seen. When conservatives wear their conservative hat, just like when Christians wear their Christian hat, they only want to engage art that touches on those values if it is completely, transparently, overtly, 100% what they want to hear. And so in order to make a movie with Christian values, it has to literally have a preacher get on stage somewhere in the third act and tell everybody that it's time to give their hearts to Jesus. But that's not what Christianity looks like when it actually plays out in the lives of the person watching that. And it's also not what that person actually watches for entertainment. When they watch movies for entertainment, they watch the same movies as everyone else. They watch Modern Family at night.

So the problem is that when we make a movie that tries to take our values and put them in a mainstream packaging so that people will engage it, that's when they have a problem. They're willing to watch Game of Thrones, and they're willing to watch the evangelical Christian movie Come to Jesus Part 2, but what they're not willing to watch is something where an actual Christian character engages in his faith in a very real way that they actually engage theirs in every day.

Because that's when they become fearful. Or when an actual conservative character lives out his values in a very real way because that's when they become very nervous. And I understand why they're nervous. They're nervous because Hollywood has pulled that rug out from them so many times.

They're so tired of falling on their face. They don't want to take a leap of faith. But people like us who are in the actual culture creation business, we need you to take the leap of faith. We need you to give us the opportunity to put these values in the most powerful medium ever conceived. I mean, Stalin apocryphally said when he saw his first movie, no greater instrument has ever been devised for controlling the minds of man. The left understands the power of pop culture. We have to understand the power of pop culture. People have to take a chance on this. Exactly right. I think one of the problems with being a conservative is that a lot of

us feel that we're obligated to be snobs about culture and to pretend that we don't, that when we go to the beach, we read Light in August and not Dick Francis. And I guarantee the people in this room, when they go to the beach, they're not reading Faulkner. And there's nothing wrong with that. And the thing that I guess I want to also sort of invoke a little bit because the theme of our conference here is the future is conservative. I think it's manifestly the case that in culture, that's more true than in anywhere else, precisely because of that countercultural dynamic, the inevitability that there will be a

reaction. And it's particularly among younger people who are, you know, who watch Jon Stewart without even realizing that he's liberal, because it's just the way everybody is. It's the way everybody thinks. And, you know, a lot of people, you know, remember George Carlin, who was a very crude, you know, guy. But, you know, I've always felt that Carlin was essentially a libertarian, you know. I mean, he just didn't like being told what to think by anybody. And he made merciless fun of environmentalism. I remember he did a great routine about, you know, oh, human beings are harming the planet. He said, let me ask you a question. Why don't you ask the people at Pompeii

whether they think they're a danger to the planet? That's right. That's a great way to make a point. So the takeaway here is the future in the atomized media business and the cheaper to enter media business can be conservative. Stories are what counts. We probably need a little help in telling those stories and getting those stories distributed and out there. And the

jokes are good. I mean, George Bernard Shaw once said to somebody, what he's sort of loftily proclaiming the brilliance of his plays, that humor is the sugar with which he coats the bitter pill of socialism for his audience to swallow. He needed more sugar. Yeah, well someone, right, the response was, well, but how clever of the audience

to lick the sugar off the pill and leave it untwalled. And so there's probably some future here for us. Maybe in a few years we'll be here with a giant box office success. I think that's right. And because we're in the culture business, it's important for our listeners to know

that we're not going to give them ideological texts dressed up in costume. It's a business. We call it a business for a reason. People have to like, you know, I put out books every day. Sometimes people like them and sometimes they don't. Exactly right. That's the deal. Art engages reality and reflects it back. And reality, reality isn't political polemics. And reality isn't a rated G experience. I mean, I think it's a shame that we live in a culture right now where you almost can't make Christian movies, even for Christians, because we don't like that the Bible isn't G-rated,

you know, or we don't like that the founding is not a G-rated experience, you know, like that there were wenches standing outside the door at Harvard when John Adams was walking by. Like, it's not like if you could just transport back to the 1700s, there was this beautiful idyllic Christian society where everyone said, sir and ma'am and thank you and please. That's right. We want to make real art that engages reality. What we have going for us is that reality itself is conservative. Yeah, and maybe make a buck along the way.

That's just me from Hollywood. As I recall, I'll leave the words of a great studio chief that I knew for a long time. And I was telling him about the show he wanted to do, that he was going to have to pay for, and how interesting it was going to be about the workplace and how people work in teams and everything, and he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where's the pretty girl? You always got to have a pretty girl.

In some version of popular culture... I have nothing against pretty girls. Exactly right. Jeremy, thank you. Adam, thank you. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much for listening.