The Conservative Media Wasn’t Prepared For Victory

Conservative journalist Ben Domenech was just named the opinion editor of the Daily Wire. On X, Domenech promised “bracing and fearless” pieces.

That’s not going to happen. Over the past three decades (or more), conservative media has poured all of its resources into owning the woke. This was bracing when political correctness entered the universities in the early-1990s and then bled out into the larger culture. Wokeness presented a threat to free speech and sanity.

Now, however, that battle, and many others, have been won. Nobody buys transgenderism anymore. Roe v Wade was overturned. Most Americans, even those against the war, acknowledge that radical Islam’s a threat. The massive fraud uncovered in Minneapolis has opened everyone’s eyes to how the Democrats operate. People laugh at Hollywood garbage like The Bride! Donald Trump, the most optically incorrect politician in history, is the president.

In short, we won. Yet because the cultural right didn’t prepare for life after victory, they have nothing to write about, aside from the same old greatest hits. The most recent Domenech piece for the Daily Wire is about “the rise of the new radical chic.” Domenech is using a 50-year-old Tom Wolfe piece to make the argument that people on the far left are still crazy. That’s the most conventional of conventional wisdom. Because the Daily Wire didn’t invest in great arts writers, opting indeed for own-the-liberals ace Candace Owens, they were left with nothing new or interesting to say about the culture. Recently Ben Shapiro announced that he’s working on a new film with Jonathan Majors. Shapiro took to social media to hype the film with his post, “You’re not going to BELIEVE what we’re doing.”

Let me guess. Owning the libs. Lady Ballers II. What they won’t be doing is making a film that is complex and worth seeing.

Thirty years ago, I wrote my first article for a conservative magazine—The Weekly Standard. It was about the ridiculous pseudo-radicalism that had taken over Georgetown University. I abandoned a dream of teaching at the university because of the Marxists in the English department, who were just as censorious and socialist as the editors at The Washington Post who’d started changing my copy to be more progressive. For the next 30 years I wrote faithfully for the conservative media, from First Things to National Review and the Media Research Center. The most freedom I ever enjoyed was at New York Press, a weekly edited by Russ Smith, who now helms Splice Today. My first piece for Russ in 1996, the essay “Manifesto of a Right-Wing Rock Fan,” took off. If it was interesting, if it was original, if it was fearless and bracing, Russ would run it. I still remember his reply when he got a complaint about all the ads for erotic services in the back of the paper: “A stripper’s money is green too.”

In other words, it was fun to challenge the left. It was also effective. With the rise of the internet and social media, it was possible to call out bias instantly. Over the years conservative media rose, finally achieving a balance with the liberals.

However, conservatives didn’t expand their coverage. They didn’t anticipate a day when their arguments would be accepted and adopted by the majority of Americans. They just kept coasting with their usual greatest hits.

They also, despite their tough talk, revealed themselves to be cowards. Ben Domenech, National Review, the Daily Wire and even my old employers were nowhere to be found in 2018, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle, when the left tried to destroy my life. Readers have accused me, with some justification, of too often bringing up the Kavanaugh nightmare, yet it still reveals how pusillanimous the “bracing and fearless” right was. Their cowardice was like the weakness of those who said Salman Rushdie “had it coming.” Conservative author and editor Joseph Bottum was an exception: “The treatment of @markgjudge was awful,” he tweeted, “and the failure of those who published him to defend him was among the most despicable.” At the time Domenech was making public appearances with Ezra Klein. Despite it being the biggest story at the time, as one reporter noted, “Klein and Domenech, founder and publisher of The Federalist, didn’t mention Kavanaugh by name.”

The late Christopher Hitchens came to the defense of Rushdie, who was the target of a 1988 fatwa after the publication of his book The Satanic Verses. In an essay in the collection A Hitch in Time, Hitchens defends Rushdie, making the point that the attack against the author was fought not just by Western liberals but by plenty of artists and writers in the Muslim world. In fact, Hitchens noted, many Western elites were showing cowardice in coming to Rushdie’s defense:

It’s been remarked before, by keener minds than my own, that almost all great moments in the history of censorship and free expression have turned on the question of blasphemy. There’s a question of proportion here, and I’m sure that Rushdie himself would blush and wriggle at the implied comparison with Socrates, Jesus Christ, Galileo, Luther, Spinoza and Tyndale. Still, a phrase keeps recurring to my mind. It comes, bizarrely, from Paul Newman in The Verdict, as he mutters anxiously outside the courtroom: “There are no other cases. This is the case.” By this he plainly means to convey, not that there are no other disputes or dramas or miscarriages of justice, but that this one has become the unavoidable one, or the defining one. The acid test. The test case. The crux. In our time, those of us who unavoidably missed the opportunity to discover where we might have stood on earlier occasions of sheep-goat separation have now been offered the chance in a rather direct fashion. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is the minds of certain “Oriental” scholars and dissidents which have been swifter to recognize this than many of their self-constrained “Western” counterparts.

Kavanaugh was also a test case, one that many on the right failed. When it came to Rushdie, the elite left of the West was more cowardly than the artistic class of the Middle East. The same thing can be said about today’s right. The art that’s going to come out of Iran after the war will be much more fearless and interesting than anything Domenech publishes in the Daily Wire.