The liberal media is in freefall. Ratings are cratering at MSNBC and CNN. The Washington Post is losing hundreds of millions of dollars and laying off staff. The Los Angeles Times has gotten so desperate that it’s hiring conservative columnists. 

Considering all of that, you might be surprised to hear that conservative media is also in trouble. But the fact is, Americans are sick and tired of politics—all politics.

The election of Donald Trump opened a release valve, allowing the country to breathe again. With that, Americans are longing to go back to focusing on art, culture, music, and their personal lives—the sort of things that make them happy. Because most of conservative media never took the time to build up a bench of good writers who could cover culture, they still have to rely on political outrage as a vehicle of cultural opinion. Thus, they find themselves in the position of the proverbial crack dealer whose corner has been converted into a Starbucks. 

As usual, conservatives didn’t prepare for the future—or, to put it another way, they didn’t prepare for life after victory. During all the years we were in the political wilderness, we could have been building an alternative to The New York Times; instead, we platformed media “personalities” and “influencers.” Watching gown men “own” college sophomores was fun for a while, but Ben Shapiro is not Norman Mailer. The gig is up. 

This is not to say that the outrage on the right was ever unwarranted. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in 1989, many of us hoped Marxism was dead. Instead, its proponents resurrected themselves from the ideological graveyard and then spread out as intersectionality into the culture, the government, and corporate America. Places like Breitbart, Chronicles, the Daily Wire and the Blaze stepped into the breach—each providing invaluable coverage as the new American Stasi tried to tell us what to read, watch, think, and say. Conservatives can be proud. We were a genuine resistance.

Yet what to do when the dog catches the car? The second era of Trump has ushered in new times. As actress and fellow Gen-Xer, Justine Bateman, has noted: It’s like a fog has lifted. Artists feel a sense of freedom that’s escaped them for years. A few years ago, Chris Richards, the music critic for The Washington Post, announced that white bands should not cover songs by black artists. That sentiment now seems preposterous. It’s like some of the rebel spirit of the 1980s is back—something I think Bateman was sensing, too. People are turning away from the screaming matches and back to culture. Even someone as conservative and interested in politics as I am can’t watch any more shouting pundits on TV. It’s over.

Unfortunately, this signals a real problem for the right because in covering culture, conservatives are badly outgunned by the left. We never learn and our donor class has never had any desire to put resources to work here so we could compete.

In 2015 I lost a job at a conservative media organization outside of D.C., where I had been covering Hollywood and popular culture. It was at a long-established media group, but a bunch of us got laid off for budgetary reasons. It was a shame, because I was winning the argument that conservatives needed to pay more attention to popular culture—not just as watchdogs or as snarky Twitter guerrillas, but as serious journalists. It was time for us to not simply note the stupid things Alec Baldwin says, but to penetrate the entertainment industry with deeper and more in-depth coverage—and above all to create our own novels, movies, comic books, and TV shows. 

My editors at the time, smart and open-minded conservatives, had enthusiastically encouraged me to go for straight interviews with celebrities, no matter who they were or what their beliefs. When approached with respect and genuine curiosity, Hollywood was receptive. I interviewed Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, Kirk Cameron, Kevin Sorbo, Stacey Dash, Harry Connick, Jr. and Taylor Sheridan. Sheridan’s the screenwriter of Hell or High Water and several hit TV shows set in the West. He gave me a fascinating interview, talking about avoiding politics in his writing while also being realistic and fair to all sides. While he wouldn’t tell me about his own views on gun control, Sheridan made the point that in certain remote parts of the country it’s often the only means of defense. “I mean,” he said, “if the police are 20 miles away, what do you do?” It was great stuff.

As the 2018 Academy Awards approached, I was gearing up for a second interview with Sheridan, this time at the Oscars. I was going to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks and getting face-to-face with the people I’d been interviewing over the phone. It was time for the right-wing press, myself included, to leave the ghetto. With pop culture superstar Donald J. Trump in the White House, it was time for us to admit victory and take our coverage mainstream. I was shopping for a flight to L.A. when the layoffs came. We just don’t seem to have the will the left does to build culture. 

For over 60 years liberals have built an infrastructure of magazines, newspapers, and both television and online outlets that cover the arts and culture as well as create art and culture.

Around the time I got laid off, jazz saxophonist Mark Turner released The Lathe of Heaven, an album which takes its title from a novel of the same name by science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. The book describes the life of a man named George Orr whose dreams end up becoming reality. He is encouraged by a psychiatrist to start improving the world via his dreams—to launch a utopian project. Yet Haber’s dreams end up making things worse. Le Guin has called The Lathe of Heaven “a Taoist novel” rather than a utopian or dystopian one. But many reviewers see in the book a Hayekian warning about liberal social engineers. It’s telling that no matter what good conditions are conjured by George Orr’s dreams, it’s never enough for Dr. Haber. He simply can’t be happy.

Turner’s was a brilliant confluence of artistic projects—an acclaimed jazz musician produces an album based on a noted science fiction novel with anti-utopian overtones. Yet because conservatives, unlike liberals, don’t have a decades-old infrastructure to publicize such a work—never mind a bright cultural mind to engage with it—The Lathe of Heaven went unnoticed in conservative media. The same conservatives who ignored it are the ones who next election will be bemoaning the fact that the left “owns the culture.” They never see the connection until it’s too late.

In 1967 a college student named Jann Wenner borrowed $7,500 and founded Rolling Stone magazine because he wanted to cover the music and culture that was providing poetry to his generation. Around the same time a student named Martin Scorsese was graduating from New York University’s film school, and a young would-be novelist named Ursula Le Guin was in the midst of getting her first five novels rejected. In other words, these artists, and many others, laid the groundwork for what they would eventually become—the liberal establishment. They did the work and played the long game. They invested.

This is why if musician Mark Turner had been inspired by Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that imagines a race that can change its gender, instead of The Lathe of Heaven, there absolutely would have been an interview in The New York Times, plenty of play on the internet, and mentions in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. The structure is in place so that when an artist reinforces dominant liberal cultural narrative, he or she has an instant pipeline to the people. This is how the left wins over hearts and minds and the right spurns them.

Even with time, millions of dollars, and worthwhile projects to develop, the right has never worked that muscle. Let me give a concrete example. I’m a fan of the poetry of Dana Goia. From 2003-2009 Goia was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Goia is loved by conservatives, who admire his emphasis on a return to form and meter in poetry as well as his Catholicism. I had an idea to film, in cinema quality, a group of actors reciting some Goia’s best work while overlooking Georgetown from the Jesuit residence at Georgetown University. A goofy little idea? Maybe. Yet those small projects are what build into big projects. U2 played school gyms before stadiums. I thought it would be easy to raise the $10,000 I needed to hire actors—good ones cost money, and despite what conservatives think, good acting is not easy. I was wrong. I couldn’t get a single conservative organization interested in the project. 

Readers may smirk at the idea of my little poetry project, but I submit that in doing so they are missing the point. They don’t understand that small things like little films can lead to bigger films, the discovery of acting and cinematography talent, and eventually big, sprawling projects that have real and lasting impact on the culture. An investment of as little as $10,000 can build future talent that eventually makes millions and influences much more than the intended audience of a small project. Yet because the right didn’t make these investments, in 2024 we have a victory with Trump kicking ass and taking names, but no existing foundation for building outward from this victory. We’re still at the juvenile stage of owning the woke on college campuses. Readers and viewers (rightly!) want something more.

As I was writing this piece, I took a break to go pick up a copy of The New York Times. It’s a communist paper, but the arts coverage is brilliant. I knew I would get nourished by the Times in ways I could not in, say, the Daily Wire. I was particularly interested in the forthcoming film The Brutalist, about an architect who immigrates to America after World War II. There was an early showing of the film, which opens in January, at the American Film Institute theater near where I live. I had pitched a story to conservative media—I would get to an early screening, it was an important work of art, we could be a part of the conversation. When they found out that, in addition to my fee, they would have to spend an additional $250 for my two-week pass to an entire European Film Festival, they spiked the idea. “We just don’t want to spend that kind of money for a single story.” Of course not. They don’t have it. I get it.

I began my turn to the right in 1990, around the time communism collapsed. Yet I never lost my love of culture, literature, and poetry nor the understanding that they are, in some ways, more important than what goes on Capitol Hill. In a place as grand and soulful as America, all that is needed is for buzzkills and leftists to leave us alone to create our punk rock, or our groundbreaking novels, our Andy Warhol-level art, or our Terrence Malick films. With Trump’s epochal win, the Stasi has suffered a blow out. It’s a new day. But conservative media has never left their ghetto. The world is moving on and wants alternatives to the cultural rot of the left. But where are the conservatives ready to offer it?

I was reading the Times and thinking of Justine Bateman and her 1980s stardom when I opened the paper and confronted a brilliant, incisive essay by music critic Jon Pareles. It’s an assessment of how the year 1984 changed American popular music. “Forty years ago,” Pareles writes, “the chemistry of pop stardom was irrevocably changed. Nineteen eighty-four was an inflection point: a year of blockbuster albums, career quantum leaps, iconic poses and an enduring redefinition of what pop success could mean for performers—and would then demand from them—in the decades to come.” Yes, yes! Here was art, culture, and the stream of life. Something with vitality and verve. I felt rejuvenated, and had no desire to see Am I Racist? Conservative media, which has fought so valiantly for decades now, is old news.