We’ve been talking about conservatives and popular culture for years and years and years since the great Andrew Breitbart brought the question of pop culture politics to the fore. Are conservatives ever actually going to get into the cultural fight? Are our billionaires – Elon Musk, who’s done plenty, excepted – ever going to get in the game and stop writing checks to Con Inc. grifts like the Forum for Eagles, Families, the Flag, and Forums, and start producing actual cultural content?
We’ve been asking that for a long time, and we have made progress. There’s good stuff out there, including, but not limited to, the ninth in the best-selling Kelly Turnbull series of People’s Republic conservative action novels. The latest novel is Panama Red, released earlier this week, and it’s as violent, hilarious, and full of conservative Easter eggs as you expect, and you should go get it. You should do that right now. The fact that my books exist is progress, partly because conservatives like me are out there creating content – and so is my cover artist, Sean “Salty Hollywood” Salter, who is also working on the upcoming Kelly Turnbull graphic novel (it looks amazing). I could make this novel series a success because the book distribution model has changed. I can partner with Amazon and have them do all the production while skipping the wine women gatekeepers of traditional publishing who have no desire to put out books that real men – as opposed to simpering femboys – like, regardless of how many men would swoop them up if available.
You should also be able to watch Kelly Turnbull on your television screen, but TV and the movies remain the brass ring for conservative creators. The ability to produce visual content has increased dramatically with the advent of digital filmmaking. Still, cost and distribution remain the big issues if you want to be in the mainstream. You’ve got to fund your project and get it to people. The Daily Wire is doing some great work on that, but it went with a subscription model, which makes it hard to get people to buy just one movie. If you want to be in the game, you’ve got to be on one of the streaming services. And that’s the challenge. It’s got to be a professional product, which costs a lot of money. But even if you do that, the people who run the streaming services typically don’t like people like us and definitely don’t like the things we want to watch.
It’s not that my books and other conservative works are not popular. I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of them since I started writing them in 2016 because nothing else was filling the void for toxically masculine novels that eschewed feelings and embraced shooting. If a People’s Republic series were on Netflix, you would watch, and so would half of America. That’s not just because it would be one of the few programs that didn’t insult you; it would be something you actively wanted to watch. There are a few of those shows out there. Some people like Yellowstone. Some people like Landman. Some people like Tulsa King. That’s about all there is as far as testosterone television. And, not coincidentally, the same guy – Taylor Sheridan – has a hand in all of them. There’s literally one guy out there producing the kind of stuff half of America might want to watch.
Everything else is woke. It’s about lame people doing boring things, whiny women complaining about their frivolous lives, and unattractive people uglifying up your screen. Everybody’s got to have a place in the identity oppression pyramid. If they could, everything would be about a differently-abled neuro-atypical lesbian 2-spirit indigenous Hindu of color who is battling those mean Christian nationalists who just won’t let them dance for some reason. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, they can still shock you. Tune into “Queen of Coal” on Netflix: “A trans woman dreams of working in the coal mines – but in a town steeped in superstition and patriarchy, Carlita must earn her way underground.”
I’m not kidding. That’s a thing. A real thing. I researched it. Someone went out there and made that show. And somewhere, an executive said, “You know what people really want? They want to settle back on their couch with some popcorn and a nice Merlot and watch the struggles of some deviant with a pick making his – I mean her – carbon-based dreams come true.” I kind of doubt a normal hero who’s not a perverted weirdo, but who likes to shoot communists with a big .45, is their cup of chai tea.
And it’s only going to get worse. To get some insights into Hollywood’s status, I reached out to my friend, conservative sommelier and Idaho real estate guru, Drew Matich, for his thoughts. He spent years as a behind-the-scenes executive in Hollywood on some of your favorite shows. Here’s what he thinks, especially in light of how Netflix is trying to swallow up Warner Bros:
“I wish I were hopeful. This merger of Warner Bros. and Netflix will just further the homogeneous nature of content by even further reducing the number of players. Paramount is also trying to buy it, but either way, it’s just going to combine two different studios. The only major independent creators left will be Disney and Comcast (Universal), and the only question there is which one Apple will buy. And believe it or not, this is a place where I hope that Elizabeth Warren gets on the warpath and screams from the mountaintops that this merger should not happen - purely for what will be the reduction in points of view.”
I asked international star of stage and screen Nick Searcy, who would be a great Clay Deeds (Turnbull‘s spymaster and general pain in the rear), what he thought:
“The biggest problem we have is that conservatives don’t invest in pop culture entertainment because they don’t appreciate the long-term impact it could have. They want a return on their investment immediately, and movies and TV are too risky. The next biggest problem we have is that we have not built a mainstream delivery system to get the few non-leftist projects that are actually produced out to the audience. This is because every film is produced one film at a time and then buried by the media and refused by the big streamers.
Everyone always says ‘What about Angel Studios? What about the “Daily Wire?’ Angel Studios isn’t really a studio. They function more as a distribution company, which means filmmakers still have to go out and raise the money dollar by dollar, and THEN, if it’s something they think they can make money with, they distribute it. And the Daily Wire only puts their films and shows on their subscription site, so they aren’t really competing in the marketplace.”
I think Matthew Marsden would be an incredible Kelly Turnbull. He said this:
“Conservative actors are a threat to the status quo, that is why Hollywood has worked hard to get them out of the industry. The few who are still there don’t have a backbone and put money over principles, so don’t expect them to change anything. What regular folks don’t get is that they will get less and less of the kind of content they want to so if they do not have conservative actors in the mix, because they are the people who get the movies greenlit. No conservative actors, no conservative movies. It is important to note that conservative movies just means non-woke. Not preachy garbage, but movies that would have been considered the norm not so long back. Movies are the American art form. They are the ultimate art form, and the left knows that they will be in existence forever. They might not get you with their agenda, but they bank on getting your kids or grandkids.”
That’s a great point about creating a talent pipeline as a way to force acceptance. My pal @GMFWashington, who writes an essential Substack on Hollywood, is still in the business and still anonymous so he can stay in the business. Here’s his take:
“Conservatives don’t play the long cultural game as well as the left does. We long ago ceded the movie business to the Left. Now, all these years later, the greatest engine for exporting American values and culture to the world not only can’t be bothered, but doesn’t actually seem to like America very much. There are a lot of people like Mike Rowe calling for conservatives to re-engage with the trades, I would argue we need to be doing the same thing with the arts. And not just as outsiders, but right here in the belly of the studio beast.”
We need to end the outsider game and get inside. We need to be a fifth column of faith, family, and the Flag. We have a lot of work to do, but we’ve got the content, and we’ve got the talent to get this started. What we don’t have is the money and the distribution access we need to do what we want to do. We don’t want to be “conservative content.” We want to be “content.” Once they put you in a ghetto, you never get out. You become something, at best, alternative and niche, but more likely weird and ignored. Oddly, almost 50% of America voted for Donald Trump, and yet so little entertainment is specifically designed to appeal to that 50% of America. We can enjoy sports. We can enjoy unchallenging, utterly apolitical shows like “NCIS: Des Moines,” but content that actually speaks to us and our values isn’t there in proportion to the size of our demographic.
We can and must keep knocking on the door, and even pounding on the door, and eventually the door is going to open, or we’re going to find a crack in the wall and go through it. But what we really need are conservatives with resources who can help produce the level of quality we need to compete and to overcome ideological resistance from the major distribution outlets. That’s when you’ll see Kelly Turnbull up on the screen in Panama Red and the rest of the People’s Republic adventures, and hopefully a lot more characters like him, but sadly, not before then.
Read Kurt Schlichter’s JUST RELEASED new bestseller in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic conservative action novel series, Panama Red, and follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter.
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