Why are conservatives so bad at media?
A comment by Sgt. Joe Friday:
I agree Lion [about the power of propaganda]. I think the leftist media is the single most malevolent influence in society today*. Without the unrelenting barrage of propaganda – which includes almost all entertainment nowadays – what would peoples’ attitudes be on issues like immigration, same-sex marriage, single payer health care, climate change, and so on? Very different I’d imagine.
That same propaganda encourages people to believe that they will not have to live with the consequences of their political choices. It seems to be an especially acute problem with female voters, women generally being more afraid of exclusion and ostracization than men. Better to have the “right” attitude (and vote accordingly) on an issue like immigration than be called a bad person by some celebutard like Alyssa Milano, even if that means ruining your local public school district in the process.
* To be fair, the media is only slightly worse than the others. A case could made for the permanent DC bureaucracy a/k/a “deep state,” the public school teachers’ unions, the DNC, the RNC, big tech, the leftist foundations, and so on.
The leftist media includes not just the NY Times and the Washington Post, which the average American doesn’t read, but ALL media. The liberal control over all entertainment is a much more powerful propaganda weapon than the liberal control over the NY Times.
Why is it that conservatives appear to be incapable of producing anything entertaining that people (whether they be proles or higher-social-class people) would want to watch?
Lion of the Blogosphere 
It’s hard to create anything when you’re effectively shut out of an entire industry. All of the outspoken conservatives in Hollywood are has-beens with nothing left to lose (Kristy Swanson, Scott Baio, Dean Cain, Rob Schneider). James Woods’ career has been reduced to celebrity poker. Outspoken Trump hater Jimmy Kimmel gets a sweet talk show gig while his old conservative partner, Adam Corolla, has to settle for a podcast. I do agree, however, that “creative” people are natural liberals. A liberal parody of “The Five” is much more amusing than “The Five” itself.
Brendan
November 4, 2019 at 12:14 PM
“Kristy Swanson”
We’ve got the original Buffy!
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 12:41 PM
“I do agree, however, that “creative” people are natural liberals”
I strongly disagree. The real issue is that the hiring decision for roles like acting and directing is almost entirely subjective, so it’s possible to make it a 100% ideological filter by whoever controls the business. If you look at non-controlled things like 4chan, old youtube, and memes, you’ll see lots of funny and creative non-liberal content.
If you want more evidence of this, look at the PRC, where all of the major celebrities are somehow 100% pro-PRC. Are pro-PRC people more creative in china and anti-PRC people more creative in the west? Seems difficult to accept.
I think the only solution is to take control of the media business. I have no idea how to do that.
I have newly-found respect for the evangelical christians who tried to do that by creating “christian media” – even though I’m not a christian.
alex2
November 4, 2019 at 3:55 PM
If you look at what Hollywood, magazines, and other outfits are putting out & have been putting out for the past 20 years you will quickly disabuse yourself of the notion that the Left is inherently more creative.
The Left’s advantage in the creative field is due to two factors (in order of importance).
1. Discrimination of Leftists in favor of working with Leftists and against White Christians.
2. Industry bias towards concentrating wealth & power in people whose only objective is pursuing fame/wealth at the expense of people who have a more rounded and balanced moral & personal outlook.
Panther of the Blogocube
November 4, 2019 at 5:05 PM
What Panther & alex2 said.
The so-called creative industries are closed guilds.
Norm MacDonald, who broke in when it was still barely possible for a fresh voice to break in, has said that most arts people are “charlatans.”
Also, in NYC, it’s simply an advantage to be gay in the theater world. I think that the high water mark for gay theater has passed, but from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, gay playwrights ruled. Most of the actors in their plays were gay as were virtually all of the directors. It really was a stranglehold. It’s actually less now, but they were so successful that straight guys will think twice before entering the business. Being a theater actor is like being a ballet dancer – people will assume you’re gay, so it puts off straight guys.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 10:15 PM
Yet the left can’t meme. Here are some funny one.
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/pislamonauseacentraltum/pc_open_thread_304/
Frau Katze
November 6, 2019 at 12:40 AM
It’s true that the right conclusively won the Meme Wars. However as the conflict begins to rise up again, I wonder if the full power of their entertainment media battlestation will rise up to take out the plucky meme rebels.
Mike Street Station
November 9, 2019 at 8:11 AM
Seems to me taht the foundational cornerstone of leftist power in America is the universities. Normal suburban kids who just want to play lacross, date, and talk about music go to college and read Howard Zinn, and suddenly
Ian
November 4, 2019 at 12:19 PM
Even Howard Zinn has been accused of not being woke enough, his lack of any mention in his books about LGBTQ stuff reveals his hidden homophobia.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 12:43 PM
Howard Zinn was an old school lefty who saw class struggle first.
Here’s why there will never be a socialist revolution in America: rich people, left and right, have figured out that the way to keep non-rich people from rebelling is to keep them occupied with identity.
“Identity politics” is an oxymoron. Obsessing about identity precludes the act of being political. Politics is about working out how to govern a people. Identity is about being tribal and exclusionary.
The Joker’s wrong. We don’t live in society. We used to, but no longer. Now we live in tribes under an imperial hand.
njguy73
November 4, 2019 at 1:29 PM
I think you hit it here. It started out at the universities. They are the source of the infection.
We need to bring in the exterminators…. please don’t misunderstand me. I mean that in the nicest possible way.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 12:57 PM
Agreed. We take it for granted that college students are radical leftists, but it’s not normal. It’s all pushed and organized by the extemely committed leftist faculty who have been there for decades. So you arrive on campus as a naive 18 year old and find that:
-All the student groups and activities are built around leftist causes
-The reading material for all liberal arts classes is stacked with leftist intellectuals
-The liberal arts faculty will openly push leftist arguments in class. And if you argue back, you’ll lose, because you’re 18 with no political debate experience and they’ve been practicing for decades.
-That makes the conservative side look even worse, so the normal students quickly join in on the liberal side and swarm them
-The only students who remain on the right tend to be Milo-type trolls who enjoy 1-vs-many arguments, but that just pushes away the remaining normal moderate students
ack-acking
November 4, 2019 at 2:41 PM
It is not the teacher unions that make teaching suck. It is the courts filling schools with illegals and the universities pushing BS in the classrooms. Parents and teachers do not love this crap at all. Illegals are low performers on average, not as low as blacks, but close. But there are so freaking many more illegals and their low IQ descendants. That is why teachers want pay for babysitting and protections from the crazy courts.
Alice
November 4, 2019 at 8:40 PM
Alice,
Illegals don’t go to college.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 10:18 PM
Speaking as someone who teaches at a reasonably upper-level state school (hardly top-tier but there are a lot worse), I have to say that the students have already been heavily indoctrinated before they arrive at university. I’m certainly not denying the very high level of leftist thought at the university, but primary and secondary education is far worse. While in the post-secondary sector, there is clearly a high dominance of leftists, there is absolute propaganda in what ed students are taught, and then they smother their students in it once they get jobs. These days, nobody but a committed leftist could ed classes. Anybody else would gag to death.
FWIW, I suspect that most everybody around here knows to one degree or another that I’m subject to “bad think,” but I imagine they have no idea how bad it is. As for teaching, it would be impossible to make a frontal assault on leftist orthodoxy, but I do what I can to get the students to keep an open mind and to think critically (in the proper sense of the word, not the leftist abuse of it). I make some progress with them, I think. It’s the most that’s feasible under the circumstances.
Theodore Mommson
November 5, 2019 at 4:16 PM
Seems to me that the foundational cornerstone of leftist power in America is the universities. Normal suburban kids who just want to play lacrosse, date, and talk about music go to college and read Howard Zinn, and suddenly they want to vote for reparations, no borders, and transsexual deification.
Some of the newly radicalized then go on to the JSchool and then into the media, where they feel they have a holy duty to use their role as a mouthpiece to further the SJW jihad. Some college grads go into Big Tech, where they support biased moderation and search result manipulation. Some teach K-12, where they practice indoctrination there. And some just vote, giving rise to the “educated/smart white people all vote D”.
Much of he rest of America has been moving radically left as they trail the movement of universities. It takes a white kid going to like Kansas State and majoring in engineering, or intentionally reading a lot of Britebart or 4Chan, to resist the indoctrination at college.
Sixty years ago, the leftists set their sights on capturing the universities, and they succeeded. The university presidents and police chiefs should have shown more backbone with firmly dealing the protestors/activists back then.
Ian
November 4, 2019 at 12:26 PM
A population descended historically from peasants has no capability of receiving an aristocratic possession. It seems to me Christian society has always operated under a “caregiver” mentality from the nobility. The “sola fide” of higher education – because of its historical sanctity – is being flagrantly betrayed by working class needle dicks who can’t get over themselves.
A Dilettante
November 4, 2019 at 4:03 PM
The working class aren’t the ones pushing marxist crap.
destructure
November 5, 2019 at 9:00 AM
I borrow from Marxian definitions of social class. Virtually all university professors need employment income in order to maintain their metabolisms. Most view themselves as being in careers.
A Dilettante
November 5, 2019 at 11:00 AM
Ha! My conservative Christian friend went to Kansas state in the early nineties, and in one of his classes they had a gay guy who was a collared bdsm slave come out and talk to him in an attempt to normalize that kind of thing. I’m sure they’re much more woke now. I doubt it’s any different at any college that isn’t explicitly conservative Christian, even in rural areas in flyover country.
The difference is that back then the proto woke were a little fringe who would only be found at universities and in the hip part town in bigger cities, and were dismissed by the majority of people, but now a lot of millennials and zoomers actually believe this stuff. Of course back then my friend and probably the rest of his class would have considered this person a freak, but what did you expect at a university?
Kjuf
November 5, 2019 at 8:10 AM
Conservatives used to run Hollywood.
Don’t believe me? It’s true. The old H-wood moguls were mostly conservative. L.B. Mayer particularly so.
He and Katharine Hepburn got along great although she was a hardcore Yankee abolitionist type because they both agreed that the most important thing on earth was making movies.
The answer to your question is I don’t know but something in the culture shifted radically in the 60s.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 12:30 PM
You should read about how during the Depression, Upton Sinclair came with a way to get people working again, but the movie industry put the kibosh on it.
njguy73
November 4, 2019 at 1:21 PM
I would if I knew what you were talking about.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 5:24 PM
Go to the Wikipedia entry “End Poverty in California movement,” look under “campaign” see the fourth paragraph.
njguy73
November 4, 2019 at 9:03 PM
I just did. Thanks – I hadn’t known about this. “The heads of Hollywood’s major movie studios strongly opposed EPIC, largely due to Sinclair’s proposal to hand over idle movie studio lots to unemployed film workers to make movies of their own. The studio heads reacted by threatening to move film operations to Florida and deducting money from employee paychecks to finance the campaign of Sinclair’s Republican opponent for governor, Frank Merriam.”
About LB Mayer: “Mayer was a staunch conservative, at one time the chairman of California’s Republican party.[4][5] In 1927 he was one of the founders of AMPAS, famous for its annual Academy Awards.[6]
gothamette
November 5, 2019 at 8:07 AM
Abolitionist type? What?
Lowe
November 4, 2019 at 3:31 PM
Meaning her type of New England Yankee pre-Civil War endorsed abolitionism, suffrage and temperance.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 5:25 PM
PS the new woke Terminator is stinking up the box office. LOL, stinkin’ up the BO.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 12:30 PM
Please don’t get Lion started on any topic that could be called “BO.” All we need to do is have someone else mention India or curry and pretty soon we’ll be reading another post about body odor.
Maryk (the g-loaded guidette)
November 4, 2019 at 4:52 PM
I’d forgotten MaryK. BTW I like the new, improved uppercase “M” in your name. Names that start w/lowercase always strike me as weird.
But Terminator is tanking at the Box Office. It has a gender queer leading lady, or person, or whatever they want to call xir.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 8:54 PM
I’m disappointed. I was looking forward to seeing the new Terminator but the reviews…have not been kind.
Mike Street Station
November 9, 2019 at 9:12 AM
Passion of the Christ, chronicles of Narnia….any recent Clint Eastwood movie… conservatives have their Blockbusters too.
mpt
November 4, 2019 at 12:43 PM
Slipping in subtle allegorical non-leftist content into occasional movies is different than contant overtly, blatantly, one-sidedly partisan fantasy visions of recent political events, like say Selma or On The Basis Of Sex.
Ian
November 4, 2019 at 12:52 PM
Producing good media requires high iq and personality traits such as openness and agreeableness. On all of these factors, liberals win. Higher iq is associated typically, though not always, with greater toleration of outside groups and openness to change.Therefore the media elite, a high iq group, is liberal. Your problem is that conservatives are stupid compared to liberals. Compare the sophistication and erudition of Obama, for example, with the crudeness and low intellect of the orange clown who is now president.
HBDIsEVIL
November 4, 2019 at 1:05 PM
How could Obama be judged “more sophisticated” than Trump when he never made a dollar that wasn’t simply handed to him by others? Did he ever win a negotiation? Was he ever even involved in a negotiation?
Vipltd
November 4, 2019 at 1:44 PM
“Did he ever win a negotiation?”
He won the negotiation to become president of the United States.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 1:51 PM
He clearly won the negotiation for Mar-a-Lago. Read up on how he conned those old ladies and got the estate for as much as a ten million dollar discount. He also won the negotiation with his creditors after his poorly considered (he was going through mid-life crisis and divorce at the time) Taj and Plaza deals blew up in his face.
PerezHBD
November 4, 2019 at 3:48 PM
He won the negotiation to become president of the United States.
So then Trump is also sophisticated, and the OP has no basis on which to consider one more sophisticated than the other?
Vipltd
November 4, 2019 at 4:11 PM
He won the negotiation to become president of the United States.
He didn’t seem to work that hard at it, or put his personal stamp on the thing, compared to Trump.
Maybe his skill is in making it look easy.
bomag
November 4, 2019 at 4:19 PM
“Maybe his skill is in making it look easy.”
Sprezzatura is an important skill.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 4:27 PM
…sprezzatura…
Heh.
Still, Obama seemed more of a cog in a political monolith than someone breaking new ground, or bucking the system.
bomag
November 4, 2019 at 4:49 PM
Obama had a very cool (calm) affect. You have to give that to him. Trump is very UNcool.
That’s about all there is to it.
Mrs Stitch
November 4, 2019 at 9:24 PM
Dumb people believe A. Smart people believe B. Really smart people believe A.
Liberals are the B group. Smart, but not that smart.
Lowe
November 4, 2019 at 4:00 PM
Obama is not a smart man.
He can’t do 7th grade math.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/10/25/obama_on_doing_homework_with_kids_the_math_stuff_i_was_fine_with_up_until_about_7th_grade.html
As for the media elite being smart…I present Don Lemon:
Rosenmops
November 4, 2019 at 7:53 PM
No one likes reactionary folks who are deemed racists.
Ok, what, who's this again?
November 4, 2019 at 1:32 PM
Conservatives are bad at media, but dems are bad at political maneuvering in other ways, such as stacking the courts, gerrymandering, lack of voting restrictions… Conservatives run roughshod over the Dems daily on issues like this.
GrassMudHorse
November 4, 2019 at 1:33 PM
I would disagree with this. Dems are the masters at gerrymander, Republicans are only now catching up.
As far as the courts, Republicans appoint judges who then go liberal, like Souter, or Kennedy finding a constitutional right to gay marriage. No liberal judge ever goes conservative.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 1:51 PM
Agree with Lion here. Republicans aren’t super-smart at gerrymandering, but rural parties almost always outperform in first-past-the-post systems. It’s actually pretty hard to draw districts in a way that doesn’t favor rural parties. And the urban/rural divide in this country has increased, making this job easier for the Republicans.
As for voter suppression, it’s pretty easy to keep people who are ineffective at life, have zero civic engagement, and live a marginally legal existence from voting, in a world where you can’t just pay them to vote for you. The hard part is getting them to show up to vote (which is where the Dems come in).
As for the courts, I think one problem is that the SC is located in DC, and the judges live their lives under certain social and cultural pressures. I love the decision to move the USDA to KC. I wish we could scatter the rest of the Federal government, moving parts of it all over flyover country, from Idaho to Alabama. Not only will the judges be under a different set of influences, but also some of the more cool/trendy/status-conscious will refuse to move to flyover states out of principle: win-win.
Wency
November 4, 2019 at 2:56 PM
I’d expand on that “Republicans aren’t super-smart” idea by adding that Republicans always had…what’s it called…common decency that prevented them from doing what Democrats have no qualms about. Gerry-mandering just being the tip of the iceberg. Losing with dignity gets old when the country has been transformed into Babylon in our lifetime. At least Trump is showing Republicans how to fight and win. Obviously, it’s something of a lost cause on the long run but still.
Ned Smithers
November 5, 2019 at 1:14 PM
S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Dragged Across Concrete were all pretty good.
A couple of weeks ago I read Finally, Some Good News by Delicious Tacos. It wasn’t great, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it. I wouldn’t have expected someone who’s manosphere and alt-right adjacent to be able to write an entertaining book, although DT definitely isn’t conservative.
Horace Pinker
November 4, 2019 at 1:58 PM
Conservatives aren’t bad at media. They are simply shut out from it. The Alt-right is a thousand time more creative with memes than the Left, because they can still (for now) send out such memes. There are a thousand right-wing bloggers and commenters that are vastly better writers than 90% of the hacks that write in the prestige media. Steve Sailer for one, but hey, he’s not getting published in the Washington Post, and never will.
There are a lot of good short films and videos that the Right creates. The Murdoch-Murdoch animation is hilarious and extremely well done on a shoe string budget. There’s plenty of good Right wing content, you just have to work a lot harder to find it.
It’s a myth created by Leftists that the Right isn’t “creative.” Hell, many of the 20th century’s greatest poets were men of the right: TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, WB Yeats, etc. Many great novelists were as well, but the conservative ones have been shoved down the memory hole because they don’t fit the agenda. Brilliant conservative novelists like William Dean Howells and George Gissing are all but forgotten, even by literature students, who instead read tripe like Tony Morrison.
Look, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” made over $600 million and is the highest earning R-rated film of all time. So naturally, the movie studios, concerned ONLY about money, rushed out lots more Christian themed movies and…. oh yeah, they didn’t. Because they make enough money to not care about making MORE money if it goes against their ideologies.
If Hollywood were required to spend equally on Liberal and Conservative entertainment, you’d see a flood of Right leaning entertainment, and the bulk of it would be far better quality than what the Left churns out.
peterike
November 4, 2019 at 2:07 PM
My eyebrows rose — in a positive way, mostly — when I spied George Gissing’s name. (P.S. An actual framed Gissing letter hangs just above this desk.) But was he really a “conservative”? Granted, he was cultured, even a bit snobbish, and, for all his feminism, what he really wanted, so it’s claimed, is admiring women who’d basically just read books and not talk too much about them. On the other hand, his constant theme was sympathy for the poor and a disdain for the callousness of the rich. Really, he seems no more a conservative than Dickens.
Simon
November 4, 2019 at 4:04 PM
“Look, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” made over $600 million and is the highest earning R-rated film of all time. ”
Until Joker.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 5:27 PM
Tom Wolfe.
Tolkien.
Lots of good right leaning authors out there.
jjbees
November 4, 2019 at 2:42 PM
Tom Wolfe and Tolkien are both dead. Tolkien long dead, he was born in 1892. Tolkien was liberal for his times, even though he was true-believing Catholic.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 4:07 PM
Houllebecq
But yeah that’s just one
Jokah Macpherson
November 4, 2019 at 10:32 PM
It should be interesting to know in which hands is the capital of all major media and studio corporation and/or who is the management of those ? In terms of ethnicity and social/educational origin.
Because in the fashion industry, it is clearly the firms who set the trends and not the other way around. All people have loosy jeans and suddenly they have skinny jeans. Same for shoes. Beards and mustaches (I would never have believed that people would look like in 2010ies would look like before WWII.
So trends are probably set by the offer. Thats why main stream medias hate Fox News and are crazy about Facebook decision not to censure conservative ads for this election.
Bruno
November 4, 2019 at 2:51 PM
Actually, I always thought conservatives had a fantastic media operation. They have the whole Fox News Network which is essentially a propaganda arm of the White House and Republican party. The conservatives also seem to be far more disciplined in talking with the media. They send out their talking points and all the Republicans consistently repeat those talking points no matter how ridiculous they are.
The day after Democrats passed the $1 trillion stimulus package to try to deal with the effects of the crash in 2009, Republicans were on TV saying the stimulus was not working and they kept that messaging up through the elections in 2010. The stimulus did work and it made the recession milder than in many European countries that failed to pass a stimulus, but the Republican messaging was so successful that almost no one realized what a success the stimulus package was and how much it had helped.
Republicans are masters at manipulating the media. Republicans dominate the Sunday news talk shows. The problem is not that the Republicans/conservative media is so poor. The Republican party really only stands for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and cutting away the safety net to reduce government spending. That is not a popular message. So conservatives have to spin these messages. The message is tax cuts for the wealthy will trickle down to ordinary people in spite of 40 years of evidence that does not happen. Republicans identify the growing inequality as a problem and then implement tax cuts and other policies to make it worse. The only reason Republicans can win more than 15-20% of the vote is because they have a superb media operation that hides there real policy agenda.
MikeCA
November 4, 2019 at 3:00 PM
“They have the whole Fox News Network which is essentially a propaganda arm of the White House and Republican party. ”
Fox News is more of an entertainment network than a news network, and Republicans don’t control it, it’s controlled by rich people who find it profitable to air content that conservative types like to watch.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 4:21 PM
If conservatives are so good at media manipulation, how did transgenderism become accepted in less than five years?
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 5:28 PM
Because „transgenderism“ is not an issue most conservatives care about. It doesn’t affect most people’s lives in any way. Most Americans are „live and let live“ kind of people. The fringes dominate issues that don’t matter very much, most of the time – transgender, abortion, guns, etc. On issues that do affect people – taxes – conservatives have a track record of winning most of the time.
Peter Akuleyev
November 5, 2019 at 1:25 AM
“It doesn’t affect most people’s lives in any way.”
Just you wait.
gothamette
November 5, 2019 at 7:54 AM
1. “Republicans” and “conservatives” are not the same thing. Some Republicans are conservative, and some conservatives are Republicans. But the two cannot be considered synonymous.
2. Fox News is one network that leans ever so slightly less to the left than the others. It has some right-leaning opinion and analysis shows, but its straight news presenters would not be the least bit uncomfortable at CNN or CBS or you name it. To wit: Sheppard Smith, Major Garrett, Catherine Herridge.
3. You want “talking points?” How about last spring when every media outlet was shrieking and clutching their pearls over the “manufactured crisis” on the border? It’s the left that marches in lockstep.
4. Republicans cannot win more than 15-20% of the vote without conservative media putting its thumb on the scale? This implies that the voting public would ordinarily vote 80-85% Democrat. If that’s the case, I’m sure I would have heard about this on CNN or MSNBC by now, they’d be all over it. But for some strange reason they’re not. Guess they’re part of the Republican media cabal too.
Sgt. Joe Friday
November 4, 2019 at 5:43 PM
Everything MikeCa writes is a walking joke. The “conservative” media is really nothing but Fox News and maybe a handful of periodicals. Still, the reason why Fox media is successful is because half the country realizes that mainstream media sources like CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the Universities, Hollywood, Government, and pretty much every think-tank is full of lies that read from the same script. Fox News is so successful not because of any manipulation but because their programming echoes what at least half the country knows.
The greatest service Fox has performed is reducing the media from Walter Cronkitism “most-trusted-man-in-America” 60’s bs into a two-bit whore selling itself to every Silicon Valley or third-world oligarch willing to keep their lights on. The modern media is what the media became under Yeltsin’s post-Soviet Russia. For this, one should be eternally grateful to Fox News for performing this service.
You want to know why leftism even exists anymore? The media targets the young. Greta Thunberg thinks her idiot environmental rantings are new, but every middle age white guy remembers hearing the same nonsense when they were 14…back in 1980. The young have no memory and can’t fathom that the adults are teaching them lies. This is why what is taught to the young should be carefully controlled, with Leftism purged from any and all curriculum.
map
November 4, 2019 at 11:46 PM
MikeCa,
“The message is tax cuts for the wealthy will trickle down to ordinary people in spite of 40 years of evidence that does not happen. Republicans identify the growing inequality as a problem and then implement tax cuts and other policies to make it worse.”
There is no such thing as trickle-down economics. It never existed as a formal economic theory and its criticism was made up by liberals. Liberal like high-taxes because, without extracting money from productive people, the liberals would never eat.
map
November 4, 2019 at 11:50 PM
“There is no such thing as trickle-down economics. It never existed as a formal economic theory and its criticism was made up by liberals.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
Trickle down is not well thought of by most economists, but that has not stopped Republicans from using it to justify tax cuts.
“Liberal like high-taxes because, without extracting money from productive people, the liberals would never eat.”
During the great depression the USA built Hover Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Golden Gate Bridge, and a host of other infrastructure projects which carried the USA into the 21st century. Now we cannot afford to build anything or even maintain the infrastructure we have.
We need to raise taxes to rebuild our aging infrastructure and to build new infrastructure for the 21st century. We need to raise taxes to provide quality health care for all and take the burden of that off US corporations making them more competitive in world markets.
MikeCA
November 5, 2019 at 6:51 PM
“Now we cannot afford to build anything or even maintain the infrastructure we have.”
That’s because of cost disease, not lack of taxes which are much higher today than they were when stuff was built in the past.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 5, 2019 at 10:09 PM
MikeCA,
“Trickle down is not well thought of by most economists, but that has not stopped Republicans from using it to justify tax cuts.”
That’s because no economist thinks about a theory that does not exist. Furthermore, Republicans do not argue for tax cuts because of “trickle down” either.
The key point to understand is that there is no linear relationship between increasing marginal tax rates and government tax revenue (or the reverse.) Higher taxes do not equal higher revenue above an optimal point. This is because there are diminishing marginal returns to taxation. Get a high enough tax rate, and you reach the point where two different tax rates will give you the same revenue. At an extreme, the government gets no money at a 0% rate and at a 100% rate.
Why does this happen? Because, at a certain point, people will trade work for leisure. Avoid these destructive tax rates, remain within the optimal range, and revenue will flow into the government. Remember, this is total tax rates, broadly conceived, which included anywhere the government “wedge” interferes with economic activity.
This is also born out in finance. Taxation is a critical variable in determining the net present value of discounted cash flows. If the taxes are high enough, then projects will remain borderline or in the red and will never be pursued. Again, in this case, taxes are a cost of doing business that will determine whether business gets done.
There is no “trickle down economics” because workers get paid first. Once the investment environment is conducive to profitable projects, workers become an input that has to be paid before any project can be deemed profitable. Workers are, in fact, a primary creditor…that have to be paid because they have lent a project their time.
Trump did an excellent job pushing capital-gains tax cuts that results in an after-tax profit of up to 40% if you were at a 35% tax rate. Projects that were borderline or in the red were green-lit, and this is why you are seeing increases in wage rates and employment, as companies hire people to expand their businesses.
Had this growth continued, you would have all the tax revenue needed to then purchase whatever basket of collective goods are desired.
Of course, it did not help that the Fed raised the fed funds rate by 1,000% which severely damaged worldwide and American credit markets and reduced the demand for borrowing. We have funky yield curves because of the Fed’s activities.
It also didn’t help that the Repubs pushed higher taxes by removing SALT deductions, another dumb budget program pushed by morons obsessed with austerity or the trade problems caused by House not playing ball with Trump on the USMCA.
The US economy is running on three wheels and a partial flat. Of course, the rest of the planet is running on four flats so we are doing relatively better, being the strongest economy in the world. But attacks from Dems, Repubs, the MIC and the Chamber of Commerce are hobbling.
map
November 6, 2019 at 3:34 AM
“That’s because of cost disease, not lack of taxes which are much higher today than they were when stuff was built in the past.”
Lion is right here as well. Hoover Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Golden Gate Bridge, etc., would never survive an environmental impact study or a zoning-challenge. Leftists and communists have crippled the US ability to produce anything.
map
November 6, 2019 at 3:37 AM
” They have the whole Fox News Network which is essentially a propaganda arm of the White House and Republican party. ”
Against every other TV news and major newspaper outlet which are in the Democratic camp?
Mike Street Station
November 9, 2019 at 9:19 AM
The type of person who goes into journalism, arts, media, or academia tends to lean left. They start out left. Exceptions exist, but they’re unusual. Conservatives tend to be more practically minded and will choose another field, even if they have an aptitude for one of the above. And if they do happen to go into one of the above influential fields, they’re well advised to keep their heads down and their opinions to themselves if they hope to get anywhere in their chosen profession. And this is why we are screwed.
Kosher Kowboy
November 4, 2019 at 3:42 PM
“Why is it that conservatives appear to be incapable of producing anything entertaining that people would want to watch?”
Great question. I’ve heard it asked many times throughout the years. I agree with the consensus answer; by nature, they are boring and meek people. They prefer it that way. They’re not interested in expressive pursuits, especially ones that don’t equate to clear near term payoffs. They’ll express themselves, in private to confidants.
White Hills
November 4, 2019 at 4:04 PM
“I agree with the consensus answer; by nature, they are boring and meek people. They prefer it that way. They’re not interested in expressive pursuits”
Sounds like more like liberals self-congratulating themselves than the correct answer.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 4:25 PM
I’d like to further add that creative pursuits, by virtue of their spontaneity, are antipathetic to those with a predilection for order and organization. You are dealing with “talent” which are so separated from any tangible world which runs on time; it takes a certain personality to be comfortable with the chaos of imitating life.
A Dilettante
November 4, 2019 at 8:48 PM
I disagree. A big project like a movie can’t be done without order and organization.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 4, 2019 at 8:54 PM
I told you, Hollywood was founded by conservatives and up until the 70s, many actors were noted conservatives. Writers less so but I can’t imagine a John Steinbeck supporting the gender insanity of today.
Most of the cameramen and stuntmen were real characters.
gothamette
November 4, 2019 at 9:00 PM
That’s why cons end up managing and accounting for the studio’s affairs while libs produce its content.
White Hills
November 4, 2019 at 9:33 PM
…creative pursuits, by virtue of their spontaneity, are antipathetic to those with a predilection for order and organization.
You have to understand order before you can see what type of disorder is useful.
Envelope pushers, notably race car drivers; daredevils; explorers, operate from a conservative base where they carefully note what works and doesn’t work.
The vaunted creative liberals of today have conservative instincts: Rob Reiner likes him a Malibu with well behaved people, sparsely populated.
bomag
November 5, 2019 at 2:59 AM
I suppose I meant from the ground floor. The inspired craving for novelty – even for its own sake – is not a conservative trait.
A Dilettante
November 5, 2019 at 6:31 PM
Sorry, OT, but another of those weird incidents that seem to happen to me just occurred. I was in line to order lunch at a popular restaurant when a 60+ white guy wearing a National Criminal Defense College t-shirt came out of nowhere and said to the woman in front of me, “do y’all mind if I just cut in front? I just want a lemonade, not gonna order any food.” The woman gives her OK and then the procedure for the lemonade takes almost as long as any lunch and I wanted to strangle the asshole.
Marty
November 4, 2019 at 4:17 PM
Copyright protection for media should be ended. Why let your enemies turn a profit from their propaganda?
chris
November 4, 2019 at 4:54 PM
https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/god-shaped-hole/
This was written by a conservative.
Jefferson
November 4, 2019 at 5:29 PM
I might read that if it weren’t written by someone so adolescent he calls himself H.P. Lovecraft.
Lowe
November 6, 2019 at 10:43 AM
Though creative people have probably aways been rebellious and questioning by nature, the industries they worked in weren’t necessarily that way and may very well have been conservative, think of pre-sixties Hollywood, TV, publishing, Ivy Leagues, etc. Not sure how the west got to where it is today but some confluence of malign factors in/around the fifties (post war affluence probably didn’t help) came together and bang, it all started going downhill. But what do you do today, it feels like we’re trying to single-handedly change the course of a river. How is it even possible to do something that daunting. My over all sense is that society will have to end up in a car crash before it is able reevaluate itself and set about a positive change over. Is Trump that pivot…. million dollar question?
Roli
November 4, 2019 at 8:06 PM
I’m still beating the “10 commandments” drum. It was removed from public schooling after 1954. The 10 Planks replaced it.
A Dilettante
November 5, 2019 at 6:33 PM
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans weren’t good at social media. Like 2008. Word went out that we must absolutely start using Facebook and Twitter, like Obama.
Whatever happened with that anyway.
Mrs Stitch
November 4, 2019 at 9:29 PM
Lion is utterly wrong.
Conservatism hides in plain sight in genre fiction: action fims, Westerns, police procedurals, even rom coms.
Steve Sailer has written a lot about this. So has Andrew Klavan, who has written some of those genre scripts.
Every drama major learns that satire is an inherently conservative genre because it assumes that people behaved better at some point in the past. Rewatch “America Psycho” and tell me its politics; it ain’t Fourier socialism.
Here’s one of Andrew Klavan’s great speeches on the topic (which is 1,000 times more erudite than Lion’s Manhattan-bubble nonsense):
Justice Duvall
November 4, 2019 at 10:34 PM
Off Topic, but this story was in the news today about a convoy of Mormons living in Mexico who were ambushed by a drugs cartel as they drove to a wedding, and brutally murdered.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7650129/Relatives-say-5-US-citizens-killed-northern-Mexico.html
Why on earth would Mormons be living in Mexico? Are they trying to convert Mexicans? If so, this is really stupid. If you really want to convert Mexicans to Mormonism then convert ones living in America, where crimes like this are still not as common (although I suppose they will be).
Some surprising details in the article. One of the children kiled in the attack was called Krystal, which is not the sort of name I would have imagined Mormon parents choosing for their daughter.
prolier than thou
November 5, 2019 at 5:34 AM
The LDS church has had a presence in Mexico since the 19th century, when the church was still looking to practice polygamy away from US laws against it. Even after the church banned polygamy* the colonies remained. George Romney was born in 1907 in one of those colonies.
*when you hear of a “polygamous Mormon cult,” it’s a group that has been de-recognized and cast out by LDS, not a official group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_colonies_in_Mexico
njguy73
November 5, 2019 at 8:16 AM
The article doesn’t say whether that particular offshoot still practices polygamy, but what’s interesting is that its women and girls look cute and normal, not ugly and weird like FLDS women.
Hermes
November 5, 2019 at 3:24 PM
Of course, the Left is secretly cheering dead White people.
map
November 5, 2019 at 7:11 PM
The reality is that modern art is missing a Hayes Code. You don’t have to churn competitive, pornographic crap when you regulate such competition out of existence.
map
November 4, 2019 at 11:28 PM
“Why are conservatives so bad at media?”
They’re not. They just don’t discriminate as much. gothamette had the right answer when she said “The so-called creative industries are closed guilds.” And you as much said it yourself a couple of days ago with your article NY Times reveals shocking extreme left-wing bias of mainstream media.
So how did this happen? Simple. Liberals discriminate against conservatives much more than conservatives discriminate against liberals. And, in universities, tenure is often granted based on faculty votes. It should be obvious from game theory that if liberals vote against conservatives more than the reverse that the universities would end up being dominated by the left. And it doesn’t have to be all of them, either. It just has to be enough of them to tilt voting in favor of the left. And then it’s a feedback loop.
This Inside Higher Education article says that Survey finds healthy minorities of social psychologists admit that they would be more likely to reject a journal submission or a job candidate because of conservative politics. And this Fortune article says that Democrats Are 3 Times More Likely to Unfriend You on Social Media, Survey Says The same would be true of any industry. Which is why any institution not explicitly right wing eventually ends up left wing.
But I noticed this long before those studies were done. Some conservative acquaintances were discussing a movie I hadn’t seen. When they asked why, I said that when an actor, musician, etc was that far left it ruined my enjoyment. They scoffed and said that was silly. Maybe so. But they’re kind of thinking is why people with their views and opinions are now blackballed. They’re called cuckservatives for a reason. We even have a few cucks on this blog. They’re the ones who “disavow”. I’m more like Nat Turner. He asked 1000 slaves, “How many of you want freedom?” And all 1000 said they wanted to be free. Then he said, “How many of you are willing to do whatever it takes to be free?” And only 900 stepped forward. Then he said, “Do you see those 100 in the back? Well, the first thing we’ve got to do is kill those n*****s!” You can’t have a revolution without whacking the weak links on your own side first. So if you aren’t willing to kill the niggas on your own side then you’d best learn to like the taste of someone else’s ass.
destructure
November 5, 2019 at 5:22 PM
The UK used to have a conservative paper, The Telegraph. I haven’t read it for ages and strongly doubt they’re pro-Trump. They’re traditional conservatives. Papers have a political bent is normal in the UK.
Ben Shapiro and his crowd on YT are conservatives. There are plenty more on YT. You don’t need a fortune to get started.
Ezra Levant in Canada is conservative.
The editorial section of WSJ are conservatives. And check out Victor Davis Hanson. He’s been a supporter of Trump.
Frau Katze
November 5, 2019 at 9:09 PM
I hadn’t heard of Victor Davis Hanson, will have to check him out.
Roli
November 5, 2019 at 11:46 PM
VDH doesn’t have his own channel but gets invited to speak and those sessions are often on YT. He’s an academic specializing in ancient history. His family has lived and farmed in southern California for several generations.
Frau Katze
November 6, 2019 at 10:52 PM
cons are bad at media because they get PAID to be bad at media…they are paid to lose…
rapping boomer
November 6, 2019 at 3:57 AM
Both conservatives and liberals overestimate the power of the media, judges, universities etc. to brainwash people and drive social change. I am a materialist. Most social change is driven by technological change. Technology has made many male roles based on physical strength and aggression redundant, and allowed women to overcome physical handicaps such as the menstrual cycle and pregnancy risk. Technology undermining traditional masculinity has led to general confusion, which in turn leads to greater acceptance of homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. Even supposedly “homophobic” countries like Russia or China are tolerant of sexual deviance and blurring of gender roles to an extent that would have seemed insane 40 years ago, and both those countries have older generations that grew up in materially deprived conditions that were more conducive to traditional gender roles.
The “liberal” media is driven by the market for the most part and follows social trends, it doesn’t set them. To the extent that the NYT, NPR, etc. have become increasingly more SJW that is a worrying trend. Not because the media is brainwashing people, but because the elite media is an early warning signal of where society on the whole is headed.
Peter Akuleyev
November 6, 2019 at 2:18 PM
Yeah…that’s nonsense.
This is the “impersonal market forces” idea that holds no traction.
map
November 6, 2019 at 6:19 PM
It is the only explanation that fits the facts. The “liberal propaganda” conspiracy theory can’t explain why liberals get no traction on guns or economic policy, and in fact have been losing ground. The “cultural marxsist in our universities and Hollywood” also doesn’t explain why social change in every country in the world seems to be moving in the same direction once they acquire technology. Even in Muslim countries the number of non-believers is rising rapidly, women are becoming more assertive, and traditional ways are collapsing. Biology and technology explain almost everything going on in the world, not “deep State” nonsense or illuminati style conspiracy theories.
Peter Akuleyev
November 7, 2019 at 4:45 AM
But those technologies are spreading as a result of deep state interference. Look at Iran and China. Iran has complete control over not only the content of their internet, but whether their people have any access to Apple and Google phones. There is no “organic” spread of technology beyond the control of the state. To believe otherwise is nonsense.
“The “liberal propaganda” conspiracy theory can’t explain why liberals get no traction on guns or economic policy, and in fact have been losing ground.”
But if they are losing ground, then why do they keep trying? Because they believe they will eventually succeed…that their deep state propaganda will eventually work.
You need to stop believing in randomness and coincidences. This is how easily you are controlled.
map
November 7, 2019 at 6:05 PM
Anti-abortion people are single-issue voters, and the media has no power over them.
The media definitely has power over the low-taxes voters, they have been switching over to the Democrats.
Lion of the Blogosphere
November 7, 2019 at 6:54 PM
Lion,
“The media definitely has power over the low-taxes voters, they have been switching over to the Democrats.”
None of that makes sense. People will bloc vote to prevent a loss of pensions or Medicaid, but they won;t bloc vote against tax increases?
People want both the government to spend money on them and to reduce their taxes.
map
November 7, 2019 at 7:18 PM