Conservatives Won't Change the Culture by Cutting Ourselves Out of It

The Daily Wire's new children's media venture is welcome, but doesn't touch the real problem.

A couple years back, Parkland school shooting survivor and Second Amendment defender Kyle Kashuv inadvertently caused a stir among conservatives when he pointed out that homeschooling, as great as it is for the kids whose parents do it, doesn’t solve the broader issue of how public education poisons the culture. His innocuous, correct insight should have inspired conservatives to look deeper at the “solutions” being offered to us and demand more of the movement’s thought leaders; instead, a number of normally-allied followers bizarrely interpreted his comments as an attack on homeschooling itself and its students.

I was reminded of that incident this week by Daily Wire personality Matt Walsh’s touting of the company’s newly-launched family entertainment app, Bentkey, which offers a supply of children’s programming that parents can rest assured won’t subject their kids to leftist racial politics, sexual obsessions, or other adult propaganda topics. That’s great news, and hopefully Bentkey succeeds. Kids and parents deserve safe alternatives to what the likes of Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network have become.

Enter Walsh, who tweeted the following straight from the chip on his shoulder (emphasis added):

Today we launched our kids platform which is already stocked with over 100 episodes of great family entertainment.

This is why I'm proud to work at the Daily Wire. We catch a lot of flak from both the left and the right. Everyone has their nitpicks and their complaints. But this company actually has a vision. We are trying to build something. Instead of complaining about the culture, we are actively trying to change it and shape it -- and taking the considerable risks that those efforts require.

The critics will continue to chirp. And we will continue doing what none of them have the skill or wherewithal to do. There's nowhere else in media I'd want to work. It's not even a close call, to be honest.

And by the way, the kids content is actually great. My kids will love it and so will yours.

Taking pride in association with an employer that prominently features Candace Owens is difficult for this writer to process, but I digress.

While not nearly as cringe-inducingly lame as that time the Wire crowd tried to pass off novelty chocolate bars as striking a blow against Woke Corporate America, the idea that Bentkey is a step toward transforming popular culture is an exercise in self-congratulation at the expense of accurately understanding the problem and what solving it necessarily entails.

Again, Bentkey is a good thing as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly as far as Walsh suggests, because conservatives providing services for each other in no way changes the culture. If a parent is troubled enough by mainstream kids’ content to seek out non-woke alternatives, their kids are most likely going to be raised conservatively with or without Bentkey. Disney and its ilk are still going to warp the minds of the massively larger pool of young viewers whose parents don’t know and/or don’t care, just as homeschooling leaves the ongoing indoctrination within public classrooms completely untouched.  

For a long time, conservatives have conditioned themselves into thinking that building enclaves and echo chambers for themselves constitutes “fighting the Left.” Pundits selling books about the badness of Democrats to people who already hate Democrats. Passing around conservative educational videos and calling them “alternatives” to the mainstream press and academia. Taking partisan rally attendance and Republican primary sentiment as indicators of public opinion overall. Churning out endless white papers about theoretical policies and red-meat monologues about the other side that rarely go beyond the sympathetic choir to whom they’re offered. Alternative schooling and entertainment for children already in conservative homes.

All of these things are, at best, simply programs and resources to prepare the recipients to go out and change the culture; they do not themselves change the culture any more than handing a soldier his rifle and sending him to basic training wins a war (at worst, more than a few manifestations of the above are nothing more than ways to make money off of naïve but well-meaning conservative audiences by looking busy, with no expectation of results). That’s why the express purpose of the Substack you’re reading right now is discussions like these, and explicitly not “Hey, Did You Know Guns Are Good, Abortion Is Bad, and Global Warming Is Fake?” Version #486,951 as our regular fare.

To actually change the culture—or in this case, just the children’s entertainment landscape—is vastly more complicated than producing and curating a bunch of shows, putting them behind a paywall, hoping they catch on with conservatives, and then hoping that somehow translates to non-conservative parents opting to subscribe despite the ubiquity of free and cheap cartoons on TV, the internet, and physical media. The biggest and hardest part of that task is, obviously, getting the creators of the problem content to stop creating problem content.

That will require conservatives getting better at organizing and sustaining boycotts (a can of worms full enough for its own separate column). Raising public awareness of woke studios’ most insidious content. Getting every Republican-controlled state government not already with the program to work dismantling incentives for companies to cater to ESG standards, and electing a president willing to do the same at the federal level. And working on other fronts (schools, academia, churches, media, government, etc.) to shift Americans closer to recognizing and rejecting propaganda when they see it.

In short, changing the culture requires changing the culture, not creating our own culture and sealing ourselves within it while the outside world burns down.