Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Winning the Culture War,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Jeremy Boreing: We launched our video program, Truth Revolt Original Videos, in April when we were forced against our will and against all common judgment to hire Andrew Klavan to make some videos for us. And much to our surprise people actually like them.
Andrew Klavan: In spite of everything
Jeremy Boreing: In spite of everything. And since that time we were fortunate to add Bill, who is probably the most successful person in the conservative video space, and more recently, Ben. And 7 million people have seen our videos. To put that into context; some information that I think is important: When we write written work, and this is across not just Truth Revolt but FrontPage Mag or National Review—the entire pantheon of right-wing web sites—the average attention span for a reader on our web sites is, as Ben mentioned in his remarks last night, 1 minute, 28 seconds. Our videos routinely hold people’s attention for up to five minutes and through YouTube’s advanced analytics, we can see to the second when people drop off both from reading on our web site and from watching our video. So we’re holding people five times longer for our videos, holding their attention five times longer. And it makes sense when you think about it because when we read on the Internet, we all do the same thing; we skim articles, and we quickly hyperlink away. As soon as you sort of digest one thought, you’re immediately off to another thought. But video doesn’t work that way. You can’t hyperlink away from the video. So people actually consume them; they hear longer arguments, and they’re exposed to more depth with the ideas that they hear.
The other important thing to realize is just how many young people are watching these videos. As the video that we just showed you indicated, our domestic audience—33 percent of our viewers—are under 35. We would obviously like to see that number get above 50 percent. But just to provide some context, the average reader across the pantheon of right-wing conservative written web sites, the 33 percent number is – more than 100 percent more young people are watching our videos than read anything written anywhere on the conservative web. And if you think about the facts – so, we have 100 percent increase in audience under the age of 35, and they’re actually consuming our content five times longer than they do the written work. I think it’s plain to see that video is not something that we should treat as a novelty in our movement. It’s absolutely essential for us to go forward and carry our message to millennials and to start winning voters who aren’t yet old enough to be president but still get to tell us who should be. And we see how well that’s been workin’ out here for these last six years. So, we’re proud of our program, and I’d like to give everybody on the panel the opportunity to say how proud they are of me.
Ben Shapiro: We are proud of Jeremy because in spite of all his incapacities, he’s been able to put all of this together. The video program, for all the things that Truth Revolt is doing, for my money, the video program—and for your money as well, by the way—the video program is the most important thing that we do. The reason is because our goal when we started Truth Revolt was really twofold. The first goal was to destroy the media where it stands. And we’ll talk more about that as the weekend goes on. We’ll have a panel later about exactly how we do that. That’s the cheap part of what we do. The more expensive part of what we do is creating a whole new alternative media for people to actually get their information. Because unless there’s an alternative distribution mechanism, then the messages that we want to see put out there—it’s not enough for us to just destroy the bad guys; we have to actually build up the good guys. And what we’ve done here is we have actually built on really a shoestring. I mean the amount of cost efficiency that we have created in this video program is extraordinarily high. Some people understand sort of how it works. We release now three videos every single week, and each one of us releases a video. Each one of those videos gets over 100,000 views which is more than an average hour of headline news will get. Really. And because we do that, the way that we cost cut is we actually film all six videos on one day. We’re actually filming two weeks in advance because we’re trying to keep costs low. Now that actually leads to a certain disadvantage in terms of the timeliness of the material that we release, because if something happens today, we’re not cutting a video until next Monday. And then that videos may not come out until a week after that. So that means that we have to forecast the news a little bit.
One of the things that we want to look to do in terms of building this out is as we increase budget—as we increase capacity—be able to walk in on the same day as the news event, cut a video, put the video up that night and make sure that you can actually grab the news cycle by the horns and impact the news cycle as it’s happening. That would make a huge difference in what we’re doing. The other thing that we need to do—and we have been doing it; it’s been extremely successful—is doing something that the right-wing movement has never really done which is called marketing. You may have heard of this.
Bill Whittle: What was that word again?
Ben Shapiro: Yeah, marketing?
Bill Whittle: No, I’m drawin’ a blank.
Ben Shapiro: Marketing and advertising. Not in as the “Let’s Drop $400 Million on Ads that Nobody Will Watch” variety. But actual marketing which costs money and is expensive, that actually has jacked up our ratings significantly. And it means that we’re drawing an audience that is not our typical audience. It means that we are going outside of our traditional audience. The people who are watching our videos are not coming, not even close to, exclusively from Truth Revolt. Most of our viewers are coming from other videos on YouTube where they’re watching a random video and all of sudden, in front of the video, you start getting Bill Whittle’s video. And it’ll play the first 15 seconds of it, and then people have to click away to that. Once they click, that becomes a view on our video, and that’s how we get those big numbers.
The marketing budget that we are spending right now—and I want to be completely transparent about this because everybody in the room is interested and is giving—the marketing that we are spending right now is $1,000.00 per video which is, relatively speaking, absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing. The reality is that Fox News will spend more on 15 minutes of programming today than we spend for the entire year, probably, for our marketing on Truth Revolt if you tripled the amount of marketing that we are actually doing. If you spend $3,000.00 per video, we would have a bigger audience than MSNBC, completely. That is not a joke. That is a very serious remark. If we were spending $3,000.00 per video—because the numbers actually grow, they don’t growth arithmetically, they grow exponentially depending on the amount of money you put into advertising. So a video that gets 100,000 views right now with $1,000.00 of marketing—you’re putting $3,000.00 of marketing that may not get 300,000 views; it will more likely get 500 to 600,000 views. The reason that all of this matters is not just because we’re looking to rack up numbers; it’s because every person who watches one of these videos is somebody who has been made open to one of the causes we are pursuing. And this is where I’m gonna flatter my other host here.
What’s great about the variety of the videos that you’re seeing is that on the one hand you have the humor of Andrew Klavan, which is designed to draw in a young audience. Young people like humor; they like mockery. It’s why they watch Colbert. It’s why they watch Stewart. It’s why they’ve never heard of Chuck Todd. And when people in our movement say, well, where is our Stewart? Where is our Colbert? He’s sitting to my left. And as we grow, one of our big goals is to turn Andrew into the actual Stewart or Colbert. I’m talking full-length show every night as we get the budget to do that. And to my right, obviously, is one of the great expositors of conservative philosophy of modern times—greatly underappreciated by everybody in kind of the mainstream media movement—but this guy has built an audience that is astonishing for having no life accomplishments.
Bill Whittle: Can I just add something to that? Thank you for your very kind remarks. I would just like to point out that I think one of the reasons that we get the numbers we get on the Firewall series is it just looks so good. And the reason it looks so good is we do shoot six of them a week. Ben and Andrew they shoot their segments in front of green screen, but I actually shoot mine in front of an actual lake of fire. And I have to have everything timed just exactly right. So I think a large part of the viewer engagement is, is this guy gonna get his hair singed, is he gonna get out of the way of that exploding fireball in time? It adds a sense of drama in the same way that traditional thrillers do.
But I’m not kidding about the look though. Professional quality asserts a certain command of its own. We are fortunate in this regard because all three of us, all four of us work in all Hollywood. We work in Hollywood where the real professionals are, and we do professional work for a living; the three of us do anyway, Jeremy. And by the way I saw that introductory video. I’ve known you for what, six years now; I never knew you had such fetching eyes. But quite seriously we do these videos in the heart of Hollywood, and we use state of the art equipment like red cameras which is what they shoot Lord of the Rings on and Star Trek on. We shoot these videos in the highest possible quality. We use the highest possible quality in postproduction, and that makes a difference. It makes them look like it’s done by professionals. It looks like real content; and it gives you a network kind of look. And I don’t know exactly where things are going in the future, but it does mean that these things can be ported into things like TV shows and be spots on Fox and that kind of thing. They hold up; they’re shot in HD. They’re actually shot in 4K which is movie resolution. They’re sent out in 1080 HD, and they look great. And that’s largely the result of Jeremy over at Declaration Entertainment and the work that we’re all doing.
Ben Shapiro: And I think that that’s, again, I think that one of the things that I want to emphasize is that winning the culture means actually making good stuff. And people on the Right seem to think that we can do that on the cheap. And nobody can do that on the cheap. Fox News is certainly not doing it on the cheap. And no matter whether it’s appearing on the Internet or whether it’s appearing on your TV—which by the way are going to merge in very short order. No matter where it appears, the look has to be professional; it has to be topnotch. It can’t be some guy in his basement with a webcam. It’s why they think we’re kooks. Honestly. You want to know why the Left thinks we’re kooks? It’s because half the videos we put out on the Internet are people in a tricornered hat sitting in front of a flag in their basement with bad lighting.
Andrew Klavan: It was before I got good cameras, alright?
Bill Whittle: If I could just add one more thing about the $1,000.00 ad buy per video. You’ll often hear companies like Nabisco saying now we’re gonna put out a viral video. No one knows how to put out a viral video. No one knows how because it’s lightening in a bottle, and nobody knows the formula. You can’t just go make a viral video. But by spending just $1,000.00 on the video, what Jeremy is doing with the precision of the ad buy is he’s making sure that at least all of these videos have enough of a floor so that it can go viral. You could produce a tremendous piece of work that gets seen by 4,000 people, and it’s just like critical mass in a nuclear reaction. You have to have enough basic views for people to start sharing them, and once you start getting them through your emails and start passing them on, then they have the ability to really go and have an actual explosive kind of an audience. And without that initial ad buy to get us to at least the floor, there’s no chance of them really going wide. And as Ben was pointing out—I didn’t know the exact numbers—but the higher that floor is, the larger the sort of pre-bought base of connections is, so then people start sharing them, and then they can really, really break out.
Jeremy Boreing: That’s right. And I would just give you a little bit more context, and then we’ll move on and talk about the culture. When you see a New York Times best-selling book written by a famous conservative author, that book was probably purchased by between 25 and 30,000 people. A New York Times best-selling book isn’t a million people; it isn’t 100,000 people; it’s 25,000 people. And studies have been done that say that maybe 10 percent of the people who buy that book actually read it. So, a New York Times best-selling book, by whomever we all adore in the movement, sold 25,000 copies, was read by 2,500 people. Our videos, three videos a week, each one being seen by between 100,000 people and – when some go truly viral – 200, 300 all the way up to 750,000 for Bill’s biggest hit this year. And Bill and I have worked on videos together in the past that have really caught the wave and been seen by a million, 2 million people. Klavan has made videos that have been seen by that number of people. And that’s not somebody who gave us a buy and then put it on their bookshelf to show all their friends that they maybe read something. This is people who have actually engaged the content, heard the argument, been either reinforced in their values and to prepared to wage better war in their own circles, among their own peers, with their own friends.
Or, because of our advertisement – As Ben pointed out, and I think it’s very important –our videos are being sent out into the world. We are not drawing people to our web site to watch them. We’re sending them out into the world. They’re being seen by people routinely who’ve never been exposed to these values at all; who’ve never been to a conservative web site; who’ve never once read a white paper from the Heritage Foundation or a long form 8,000-word essay from National Review Online. These are people who’ve never heard our values articulated before, and they’re seeing these videos. So for everyone who’s supported them up until this point, we’re immensely grateful for that support. And for anyone who’d like to know more about them going forward and might like to join us on our little adventure, we’d love to talk to you at any time during the weekend. We think it’s very important work, and we think that it’s the future of where our movement needs to be. We also think it’s a place where the David Horowitz Freedom Center is way out ahead of the curve, because very few people are actually producing this content on our side. I’m privileged to work for Dennis Prager, Prager University, producing videos there as well. And you’ll hear from Dennis this evening who’s also sort of on the front lines in this particular regard.
But really, we’re the only two organizations who are putting out this quality of content and not locking it up behind a paywall, because you have Glenn Beck who makes wonderful video, but it’s not being seen by anyone who is not willing to pay Glenn Beck $10.00, and that’s a wonderful business model. I’m not in any way denigrating the great work that he is doing. But I’m saying it is a different work. What we’re doing is much more evangelical because we’re putting out these videos for free and exposing people to them who aren’t already prepared to give us their $10.00 a month, who aren’t already visiting our web sites. We think it’s important work, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to continue in it.
Ben Shapiro: It is free, high value, high viewership content. That’s what we’re doing. And it’s coming out every single day. I mean three days out of the week, we are putting this out, and we want to up that. We are building a TV network. The question that I think all of us on the panel probably get most is, well, why don’t conservatives just buy CBS or NBC or ABC—certainly one of the questions that we get the most. And the answer is because it costs probably ten billion dollars to do that. Well I mean for a fraction of that price, we can build –
Jeremy Boreing: As little as ten percent of that price.
Andrew Klavan: I started to do videos with a place called PJ TV, and the reason I started doing videos at PJ TV was because I was watching it, and I saw Bill. And I thought this guy is spectacular, and if the world were not what we know it is, he would be on a network. And I thought he’s smart, and he’s got a great presence, but he’s lacking one thing, which is that he’s not out of his mind. And I thought I can bring that to the table. When David was kind enough to include me among the young people, he was referring to the fact that I’m 8 years old in my head, and I think that when we started doing those videos together we understood that we had a moment where there was Bill, there was me, there were a couple of other people, were people who had never had a chance to speak who had immense talent, and immense ability in this arena were suddenly given a voice and yet—and I don’t want to run PJ TV down because they do a great job, but they also have this business model where they lock their videos away. They make it more difficult because they’re trying to draw in that profit; trying to find a way to monetize it. It wasn’t working for me until Jeremy basically said we can do this in another way. We can do this and get these things out there.
And so the marketing behind this—and the way that Jeremy directs—and this is the nicest thing I will say to you for the rest of your life probably, so yeah, take a breath, enjoy—the way that Jeremy directs the videos, which really brings them to life, is stuff obviously you guys don’t see, but it means so much to me when things that I do get better in the room. And the way he has figured out YouTube, figured out how to spread this stuff out there, is new. It’s different. It’s not being done anywhere else, and it’s resulting in huge numbers. I will go on about the numbers later a little bit just to give you comparisons. But what they’re saying about MSNBC is absolutely true. A few more bucks of marketing, and we’ll be trouncing them. Bill.
Bill Whittle: First of all, I’m not aware that Jeremy was in the room when we’re recording my videos. But secondly, when Andrew came to PJ TV I was just getting started with the Firewalls. He’d just started his Klavan on the Culture. And Andrew came out of a studio and we were both in the studio at the same time, and I’d just got the latest numbers on Andrew’s video, Shut Up; the first Shut Up video. And I think he broke 30,000 views. And I remember clear as day coming out of that green cube in PJ TV going, he got more than 30,000 views, really? And I thought I’m gonna have to get to work, and I’m gonna have to kick this guy’s ass. He got 30,000 views. I gotta do better than that. And I remember thinkin’ 30,000 views, it’s incredible. Because prior to that, literally hundreds of people had heard of Andrew Klavan. But seriously though that was a huge number; it was a huge number. And then we did the atomic bomb thing; and that’s at 300,000. And then things started goin’ up higher and higher and higher. But the ad buy that Jeremy does is so precise. It takes so little money and pushes it so far that the floor now—we could never image a floor of 100,000 views. This is not even possible to imagine that, even six months, seven months; a year ago.
Jeremy Boreing: So thank you.
Andrew Klavan: Yeah. Thank you.
Ben Shapiro All of us here should actually give you guys a round of applause. Because the truth is that without your guys’ contribution and you getting behind this project, we would not be able to do what it is that we do. So thank you.
Jeremy Boreing: And now we’re going to change gears a little bit and take you to that heady world called Hollywood, where we all drink champagne and sit in hot tubs until noon and destroy culture corrosively from within.
As Bill pointed out, everyone who is up here right now works in some way in the movie business. We’ve all written numerous screen plays. We’ve all had the opportunity to work on film sets, and if there were a secret organization of underground Hollywood people, we would all be a part of it. And we see firsthand, day to day, just how hostile that community is to the values that we would like to see celebrated in our culture. And as I said last year and would repeat again this year, young people consume 40 hours a week of film and television media. That’s a fulltime job. And if you think about the fact that they also go to public schools, most of them, for 40 hours a week, they have two fulltime jobs of being indoctrinated by the Left. Conservatives tend to understand that we need to do something about education, and there are great organizations that engage in that battle. And in fact, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is very active on campuses engaging in that battle. But very few people in our movement understand the need to fight in the culture.
David, early on, understood the importance of that and part of what unites the four of us on this stage is that that’s actually where our hearts are at. At the end of the day, if you really want to know where we would all like to be right now, it’s on a movie set, seeing our values not done polemically but seeing our values being part of the subtext of the kind of stories that take people on adventures and change their minds over time. I’m a conservative today, but for two reasons, really—the Cosby show and Braveheart. And that sounds like a funny thing to say except that when I was consuming my 40 hours a week of television when I was under 18, the dads on sitcoms, they were goofy, and they were funny, and they were the butts of jokes. But at the end of the day, they were the dad; they were the man of the family. And they sat you down and taught you a moral lesson at the end. And now, you don’t need me to tell you this. When you watch the television, the dad on any TV show, it’s not that the mom is always right. She’s always right compared to the dad, but the child is actually always right even compared to the mother which is, of course, part of the Left’s strategy to keep us all in basic perpetual infant states because that’s the only people who would ever vote for their ridiculous policies.
And so, one of the things that we’ve done at Truth Revolt, under Ben’s leadership, is pick fights in the culture. And many of you may have followed a little story called the biggest news story in the world last week, which was our very public fight with Lena Dunham. And that was an important fight. And a lot of people in our movement didn’t understand why it was important. The first day that we were in our battle with Lena—first of all, I know Ben, you mentioned this last night, but maybe not everyone was in the room. Does everyone in the room know who Lena Dunham is? Good. Now we do because Ben gave a great speech about it last night. Lena Dunham is more important to the Left today than Jane Fonda. She is more important to the Left today than –
Ben Shapiro: She is more important than Nancy Pelosi.
Bill Whittle: She is more important than Barack Obama. No. She is. She is. Because people watch her show. And if you think young people sit around and listen to the President’s speeches and know about his policies, you’re out of your mind.
Jeremy Boreing: That’s right.
Bill Whittle: They don’t. They watch Girls on HBO, and they watch other shows that they’re celebrity fans of, and what those people do and how they vote is how they’re gonna vote. They don’t know the first thing about Barack Obama or his policies, and they don’t really care.
Jeremy Boreing: They know that Lena Dunham likes him.
Bill Whittle: That’s it. And they like Lena Dunham, and they like the show, and they like Matt Damon, and they like all these other people.
Andrew Klavan: It goes beyond this though because Lena Dunham’s show, the finale of the third season of Girls, got fewer views than your Ferguson video.
Bill Whittle: Really?
Andrew Klavan: Lena Dunham is the Barack Obama of Hollywood in the sense that she is a mediocrity who has been elevated to icon status because she plausibly represents false ideas that the Left loves. They’re exactly the same person. Her audience for the second season was not as big as our audience has been since we started Truth Revolt. Why then is she so famous? I’m not on the cover of Vanity Fair, and I’m just as unattractive and dumpy as she is. And the reason is, is because they own the bigger culture. They own the echo chamber. And they can take someone like her who is not doing what we’re doing, not getting as many views as we’re doing, and turn her into this icon. And so we are fighting Lena Dunham and what people don’t understand is when we’re fighting Lena Dunham, you’re fighting principalities and powers. You’re fighting the forces beyond that. The same thing was true with the Batman movies that came out by Christopher Nolan?
Jeremy Boreing: Nolan.
Andrew Klavan: Yeah. When I mentioned that they were really conservative movies in a couple of Wall Street Journal articles, the Internet exploded. I got an email a second, an email a second. It was the top story on the Internet, and I was relentlessly attacked. And my brother, who is as far to the Left as I am to the Right, called me up and said why are they attacking you, you’re obviously right. And I said because they don’t want anyone to know I’m right. See, it’s more important that you don’t know. We have won three smash-mouth victories in the cultural wars this year. I mean enormous victories. One of them is the failure of Barack Obama, which we had something to do with, but it was really handed to us on a plate. The other is something called Gamergate. Does anybody know what Gamergate is?
Jeremy Boreing: We should talk about it.
Andrew Klavan: Yeah. One guy. All right. I’ll come back to that. Huge victory. And the third was this Lena Dunham thing. The third was you guys taking down Lena Dunham. And the reason we won Gamergate. May I talk about this for a minute?
Ben Shapiro: Yes.
Andrew Klavan: All right. Gamergate was a conspiracy of left-wing, especially feminist journalists, to attack video games for not being inclusive, not being feminist, not including transsexual characters. And so if you brought out a video game – and remember video games are a bigger business than Hollywood. They take in more money and get more views than most movies.
Jeremy Boreing: That’s right.
Andrew Klavan: When you bring out a video game, it would get bad reviews on the big sites. I’m a gamer so I would go on and look at these sites. And it would just say this is not a good game. They were caught by a group that called themselves #Gamergate because it was all on Twitter. And they basically took them down. They basically exposed them with the help of Breitbart.com, mostly. If you go on right now and Google Gamergate, all you will get is left-wing propaganda about it; all you’ll get—I mean the Wikipedia—it’ll tell you, oh, it was this terrible thing that the Right did to these people. So they own the echo chamber. Even though the Gamergaters won the fight—I mean it was a huge victory because they exposed them; they beat them back; they were just humiliated—but the Left is quietly taking back that area of the culture.
So Lena Dunham’s fame is evanescent. It’s something that they create outside of her accomplishments. 600,000 people are watching her shows; the same as are watching our videos lined up in a row. But they have the magazines; they have the television stations; they have the interviews to create what it is. So when we take her down, we’re taking down all that stuff. And that’s why it’s important.
Bill Whittle: And I think that something that normally just really depresses people, really should just be looked at completely differently. The Left owns the entire culture. They own all of music, all of television. They own radio. They own late-night comedy. They own universities; they own everything. And it’s still a 50:50 country. We don’t have to move the ball 98 yards. We move the ball 2 yards and it’s over for them. And the main reason it’s over for them—since we’re talking about the culture is this—people like conservative values. And when I say conservative values, I don’t mean people like stories where deficit spending is at a certain percentage of revenues. People go to see movies where usually an individual man has a gun. He is protecting a beautiful girl, and he is trying to escape from danger that’s more powerful than he is. That is why we tell stories. It’s the same story every time.
The great irony for these people, if they had the ability to look at themselves in the mirror, there wouldn’t be any leftist. But guys who are super pacifist and super leftist like Matt Damon or Jamie Foxx come out against guns, but you never would have heard of Matt Damon or Jamie Foxx if they hadn’t been blowin’ guns and shootin’ everything alive in every single one of their movies. And so all of the things that we like about people: adventure, individuality, heroism, courage, the ability to act on your own—I said this a couple years ago here at the Romney speech—James Bond doesn’t go on a mission armed with a harshly worded letter from the United Nations. He’s got a Walther PPK, and he means to use it. And he’s a well-dressed, competent, tough guy. And it must gall the Left that no matter how hard they try, everything that people like about the end product is the essential conservatism of it. And that is such an unbelievable opportunity for us because we don’t have to put a message on that message. That message is the message people want.
Andrew Klavan: Yeah. A couple years ago the New York Time wrote a story complaining that there were no abortions as happy endings in movies. Why couldn’t abortions be happy endings? And they really don’t know the answer to that question. They cannot figure it out. And what Bill is saying is absolutely right. We win every time unless we let them change the message. The message of a good story is always gonna be conservative; every single time.
Bill Whittle: And just as a very quick coda to that, too. This to me is the great victory for us. Whenever the Left decides to portray a conservative on television, they’ll over conservatize him; they’ll make him a cartoon, a parody. And that character, who’s designed to be the foil, universally becomes the most popular character on that show. And that started back when this whole leftist attack on the culture began, which began about 1970 with All in the Family and Norman Lear. All in the Family changed America. And All in the Family set up Archer Bunker to be the foil. He was stupid; he was racist; he was mean; he was cranky. Mike Stivic, on the other hand, very well educated, wellspoken, very compassionate, very tolerant. And all of America understood that Archie Bunker is the person they love because they could not escape the fact that Archie Bunker goes to work on a loading dock so that Mike Stivic can live in his house for free. They can’t get away from that. They can’t. And so, on some fundamental level, the American people were supposed to hate this man, but they ended up loving him because they understood he is being mocked daily by this harpy that lives on his shoulders, and Archie is paying for this guy to give him all this crap all the time, and still he allows it. They don’t understand how they destroy their own philosophy. And Denny Crane is another example of a conservative who is written to be a joke. And Denny Crane starts pulling guns out and laying ‘em on the table. And people start just cheering. And the Alec Baldwin character on –
Andrew Klavan: 30 Rock
Bill Whittle: Yeah. Exactly. Alex P. Keaton. They try to make them into buffoons but the American people connect to our values. There has never been an open field of gold lying there like there is for us right now in the culture. Never.
Ben Shapiro: And that’s the stuff that people watch. And I think this is really the key point. The conservative movement has spent the last 50 years hating young people, wondering why they can’t get young people, but hating young people at the same time because young people are glib, and they’re stupid, and they watch five-minute videos and because they won’t read Russell Kirk. And all of that’s true. Young people are glib and stupid and won’t read Russell Kirk. But the one area in politics where the Right has completely blown it – the truth is that the TV industry was started by conservatives. If you look all the way back, if you look all the way back to the founders of CBS, and you were looking at the people who created these networks, General Sarnoff and company, these were folks who were actual conservatives. They voted Republican because they were business people, and so they realized we have to cater to a particular audience.
In your business you cater to a particular audience. In a conservative political space, we ask how do we sell our content to these people instead of what do these people want to buy? And what young people want to buy is the same stuff that we all want to buy in our off hours, which is story and characters that we identify with. And this is where the Left has made so much hay because the one area – and I agree with Drew and Bill that storytelling is inherently conservative because without a good and without an evil, there is no story.
Bill Whittle: Right.
Ben Shapiro: And the Left does not believe in good and evil, so they have to use the tropes that we have created for them. They make us evil, but they’re still working within a framework that is our framework. This idea of a moral right and a moral wrong, and there’s a good guy and a bad guy; that is inherently conservative. But what they’ve done that is so clever and insidious and dangerous is they have very effectively turned heroism into victimology, meaning that the hero doesn’t actually have to do anything; the hero just has to be victimized. The hero just has to be someone to whom something bad happened. And that’s where we really have to fight back. And we have to fight back using all of their tools. We have to fight back using mockery. We don’t mock them nearly enough. We take them way too seriously. We act as though their arguments are worthy of an actual response, which they are absolutely not.
Jeremy Boreing: And by the way, this is a place where, again, when Ben says everyone on this panel is asked frequently why don’t we buy a network and that’s a multibillion dollar proposition. And frankly, some of our videos do better than things on networks, anyway. The technology is moving toward us; not away from us. As Ben said, that your TV and your Internet will be the same thing within the next five years. But one place where we can make immediate inroads, and this is something that Drew’s really forward thinking about, is with sketch comedy. The Internet is built for sketch comedy. The attention span on the Internet is like three minutes long, and a Saturday Night Live skit—at least the funny ones—are about three minutes long. As they get later in the show, they drift into seven minutes. You don’t know what they’re talking; Jimmy Fallon’s laughing, and you’re like, you’re not on this show anymore. They don’t understand.
So a great political video, an out-of-the-park hit political video will be seen by a million people. And that is a huge number of people. But, an average comedic sketch on YouTube will be seen by ten million people, and some are seen by one hundred million people because people love entertainment. Entertainment functions in an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude away from political content. And the beauty of sketch comedy is you get to decide what you make fun of. And no one ever mocks the Left. As our organization grows, we want to start doing comedic videos that don’t promote our promote values; they just ridicule their values. And I think that there’s where we’re gonna go.
Andrew Klavan: And that, too, if you look, two of the most successful guys doing this today are guys named Key and Peele, two black guys.
Bill Whittle: They’re great.
Ben Shapiro: They’re hilarious.
Andrew Klavan: They are hilarious. And they don’t have any political point of view, but it’s all on our side, as far as I’m concerned. I mean it just mocks the assumptions of the Left. Yeah.
Ben Shapiro: If you want to laugh later, look up Substitute Teacher by Key and Peele.
Andrew Klavan: Oh, hilarious.
Ben Shapiro: The funniest thing in the world.
Jeremy Boreing: Which by the way has been seen 70 million times on YouTube.
Ben Shapiro: The point of all of this is that if we want to appeal to young folks, and young folks are who we’re going to have to get – we’re going to need to speak the language the young folks speak. And that is not the language of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. It’s not the language of pamphlets, unfortunately. It’s not the language of reading, because most of them can’t read. They speak the language of entertainment and comedy. And by the way, that stuff shapes people’s values significantly more than the conscious attempts to shape their politics.
Because values underlie politics. Politics do not underlie values. Your politics are your politics because of the way you feel about the world. It’s not that you shape your politics, and then you decide how you feel about the world. And this is what Hollywood is in the business of doing. Hollywood is so great at this, because what they’re in the business of doing—and this is why they’re so effective—is they create people you want to hang out with. That is what they get paid to do. You are willing to pay to hang out with these people, or you’re willing to set your schedule so you’re gonna hang out with this particular group of people every week at a given time, which you wouldn’t even do for your own family, but you’ll do it for these folks who are written for TV. And then what they do is they take these characters, who you like so much because they’re so likeable, and they’re so funny, and they’re so witty, and they’re so interesting, and they have such interesting lives, and then they take those people and they have them do things that you find atrocious. And then they say to you, okay, but you like that person. So they do something atrocious. Well, maybe it’s not atrocious ‘cause you like that person. And it’s insidious, and it’s tremendously effective.
Andrew Klavan: And this is a huge moment, when I said before that the failure of Barack Obama was a smash-mouth cultural victory, what I meant by that is reality tells a story, too. And the story of Barack Obama, which is the first political story a lot of these young people have lived through, is this guy descending from heaven, the light worker descending from heaven with hope and change and turning out to be an absolute clown. That story is going to get rewritten by the Left unless we stop it; unless we keep that story alive because that’s the truth. They saw it happen, and they’re ready to hear something new. What went wrong? They were sitting there worshipping this guy as he descended in that beam of light from Krypton, or wherever the hell he was from, and they saw that he turned out to be a complete clown. They don’t want to hear that he’s a Muslim superspy. They don’t want to hear that he is born in Kenya. All they need to know is that his ideas were wrong; they were taught to worship a false idol. They lived that story. And now we just have to tell it to them.
Ben Shapiro: And you know you’re totally right about the clown point. That is the telling point. Because Gerald Ford was destroyed by one video on SNL of a man bumping his head. Okay? Sarah Palin was destroyed by one video on SNL of Tina Fey saying that she could see Russia from her house. And by the way, if you poll young people today, ask young people, did Sarah Palin actually say that she saw Russia from her house? Virtually 100 percent of young people will say that Sarah Palin actually said she saw Russia from her house.
Jeremy Boreing: Not just young people. I have spoken in rooms full of adult conservatives who think Sarah Palin actually said that. If you don’t know, Sarah Palin never said that she could see Russia from her house. That is not true. Tina Fey said it on Saturday Night Live, and it’s part of how we now perceive the world.
Andrew Klavan: And listen, the chief political satirist, the chief political writer for Saturday Night Live, said that Barack Obama, he was a 10 out of 10 impossible to make fun of because he was like a wall of smooth black obsidian that you couldn’t find anything mockable to get hold of; he couldn’t make fun of Barack Obama. He couldn’t make fun of Barack Obama. I mean come on, think about that for a minute. That’s insane. So, if they are that blind that when they look at Barack Obama, they see somebody who is unmockable, the fruit is lying on the field. It’s not even low-hung fruit. It’s just fruit lying on the field.
Bill Whittle: I would just like to just use a very, very quick example to explain to you the power that a movie narrative has of telling a story in terms of politics. I’ll make this very, very quick. I have a movie I’m working on called the Common Sense Resistance, and in this movie, we have a young man who’s living in substandard housing, and he’s got okay food and so on. And he is selected by the powerful to infiltrate an organization, an underground organization. And he’s sent a girlfriend and all sorts of other things. He’s promised all kinds of riches. The man descends back into the Underworld where he’s living under the city. He’s getting shot at; he’s basically eating rats on a spit. He’s living in sewers. People are coming at him to kill him. Other people dying to protect them, and at the emotional climax of this movie, this guy takes a bayonet from a former Iraqi war guy, and he cuts open his forearm, and he pulls out this little chip that gives him all of his social benefits, and he puts it down on the concrete, and he smashes it with the butt of his bayonet. And that’s the center of the movie, is his decision to live in this world of danger. Now every single person that watches that scene is going to be on this guy’s side because he’s done something dangerous, painful. He’s given up something good. He’s given up something easy for something horrible, dangerous and painful. What politics have I put into that? I haven’t put any. Is he leaving the world of communism to join an underground resistance of people or for freedom, or is he leaving the world of evil corporations to join an underground world of socialists? It doesn’t matter, and people don’t care. So the fact of the way the story is structured automatically puts you in that person’s shoes, and whatever that person does, you start rooting for.
The politics should be completely transparent. It shouldn’t be about this. It’s a guy doing something heroic or something dangerous or something like that. And the audience is with that person automatically because of how the story is structured. When you can deliver that kind of content—a great example of this was the movie, 300. It think it came out in 2005. It was a cartoon kind of a version of the Spartans making the stand of the 300. I saw that movie in Santa Monica. Santa Monica is where they think vegetables should have human rights, ‘cause a lot of vegetables do have human rights in Santa Monica. But I saw that movie in Santa, and I saw 15-year-old boys coming out of that movie saying the Spartans are the marines and the Persians, and they got the whole thing. And they got men standing up in front of the women and fighting and all. They got it; they got it immediately. It wasn’t about anything today. But it had an enormous influence on how people saw the idea of defending your own cultures and warriors and responsibility and dying for a cause. That stuff has a power, orders of magnitude beyond what we can do. And that’s what the Left has had to use to get the influence they have.
Jeremy Boreing: And I would say, too, that on this concept of what we mock, not necessarily what we champion, one of the most heartbreaking stories of the week this week for me is that Peter Jackson, who is the great director of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the subsequent terrible Hobbit movies, Peter Jackson—this isn’t just something in his personal life, this is something that is in the behind-the-scenes of the second Hobbit on Blu-ray, so it’s a part of the story he’s telling about the movies that he’s made—he presented Stephen Colbert with a replica sword from the movie. And told him this is to help you defeat those tea partiers in the upcoming election.
Bill Whittle: Here’s a man who made six movies about Sauron, about the power of narcissism, about the appeal of power, about a creature whose entire purpose is to exert his will over other people. He made six movies about small bands of little individuals trying to fight the power, and when he is confronted with his realworld politics, he automatically goes to the powerhungry left instead of the story that he’s been telling for the last 12 years.
Jeremy Boreing: But even more specifically, he made the most conservative trilogy of movies probably ever made, but he doesn’t know that he has ever met a conservative. And the fact that it was Stephen Colbert that he presented the sword to is so informative, because Stephen Colbert is the reason that Peter Jackson not only doesn’t know that he’s conservative but doesn’t know that he’s ever met a conservative even though he’s probably surrounded. And even though most of the fans that probably come up and talk to him are not just conservatives but Christian conservatives and not just Christian conservatives but American Christian conservatives. Why does he not know who those people are? It is because Stephen Colbert is conservative to the Left. They’ve created this caricature of what we are.
If you want to know what young people think about you—they don’t think that you’re a good person who is just trying to maintain basic, fundamental human liberty. They don’t think you’re a good person standing up for individual responsibility. They don’t think they’re an individual person who just thinks that people should be entitled to keep the fruits of their labor; that it’s actually better for the poor if we have a free economy; that it’s actually better for society if we have a strong military. No, they think that you’re evil, racist, warmongering, bigot, homophobe who actually wants to put black people back in chains and strap dogs to the roofs of your cars; who wants to put women in giant binders where they’re not allowed to have sex ever, ever again. That’s what they think about you. They think that you’re a bad person because Stephen Colbert plays you on TV. And when Peter Jackson hands that sword to Stephen Colbert to fight you, it’s not to fight you. Peter Jackson would actually like you. He’d probably even would, to his surprise, agree with you. He doesn’t know you exist. He thinks that the character that Stephen Colbert plays is who actually votes. And that’s why we have to get busy mocking them. We have to create caricatures of them.
Bill Whittle: What did Peter Jackson do? Peter Jackson handed Stephen Colbert a weapon. He said here’s a weapon for you to keep and bear at your home. Go stop the conservatives. And they don’t even understand how far out of reality their philosophy is. And I think this is really the main point that we’re all trying to get at here is that even the Leftists in Hollywood, when you get right down to it, are fundamentally, basically conservative people. They have to invent a cartoon that they can provide themselves with moral superiority above; I’m better than those awful people. And even their own actions in a vacuum are conservative actions. Here you go Stephen Colbert. I’m going to give you a weapon so that you can go and fight the people who are fighting for your rights to keep a weapon.
Jeremy Boreing: By the way if Bilbo Baggins had had an AR15 that movie would have ended much sooner.
Bill Whittle: Much sooner!
Jeremy Boreing: Well, we need to wrap up because – I’m sorry I interrupted.
Ben Shapiro: Oh no, not at all. I think that this is the essence of it. And that is, we need to get into this space. We have a panel every year about the culture at Restoration Weekend. And other events you go to will have some sort of panel about the culture war. People will sit and bitch and moan about the culture and how terrible it is and how it was better when everybody was walking uphill to school both ways and the Waltons was on TV and all of that. By the way, I grew up on the Waltons. Jeremy talked about the cultural forces that shaped him; I grew up on 1776, the musical, and the Waltons and old, like Gershwin musicals; and that’s what I grew up on. Instead of complaining about it, there are only two things that we can do. One is focusing on taking down the cultural figures like Lena Dunham which involves taking down all the people who defend Lena Dunham, which I think was the greatest kind of switch in time. Time Magazine originally came out and defended Lena Dunham. For those who didn’t know the rest of the story, Jeremy kind of did the setup, but we didn’t do the conclusion of the story: Lena Dunham, who writes for HBO’s Girls, she writes all the scripts. She is this 28-year-old woman who’s most famous for being lumpy and hideous and getting naked as much as humanly possible on her own show.
My favorite part of her memoir, by the way, is where she complains that Hollywood wants her to get naked too much. She writes her own show. She writes her own show. It’s like the Menendez brothers complaining that they’re orphans. Lena Dunham, it turned out that in her memoir, if your were here last night I talked about this briefly, Lena Dunham in her memoir had a bunch of sections about sexually abusing her sister. And the Left came out and—I mean like actual sexual abuse of her sister, her younger baby sister—and the Left came out and defended her originally. Time Magazine ran her quasi apology. They defended her; this is over the top. How could this right-wing conservative web sites attack Lena Dunham? Two days ago Time Magazine ran a piece basically saying that Lena Dunham shows that we need to take sexual abuse more seriously. Meaning that the machine collapsed in.
Bill Whittle: This guy did that. Him. By himself. With your support and your platform, this guy, here, by himself did that. And just to show you the reason these people are winning is not because they are beating us. They’re winning because we’re not on the field. It’s not like we’re out there gettin’ defeated by these clowns. These people can’t open a jackknife. We’re losing because we’re not on the field. And they have to keep us off the field in order to keep winning. We put five guys on that field, well four, anyway. And it’s game over for these people because they have to own everything. It’s like the end of the Emperor’s New Clothes. You don’t need everybody in the parade to say, hey, you know what, he is naked. You need one person to point out that this is all a bunch of nonsense in a way that people understand, and the entire thing comes down. It’s just that simple, and it’s just that important.
Ben Shapiro: So if we take down their machine and then we create a new machine, which is what we started with here, if we create that new machine, if we get into the business of mocking them relentlessly – George W. Bush will be a punch line for the rest of time. He will. The Left made George W. Bush, who was a good man fighting a valiant war, they turned George W. Bush into a punch line, and he will be for the rest of his life. And that’s what the Left accomplished. If we don’t get into the business of doing that, we’re gonna lose. And we can complaint about it, but we are. And if we do get into that business, there’s no way that we can’t win, because the field is wide open. I mean it’s wide open. There is no defense to this. It doesn’t even occur to them. The thing that’s so stunning about Lena Dunham’s story is that she wrote this as a 28-year-old in her book and never expected anybody to even find it or bother with it or even be mildly troubled by it. And you know what? She was right. Because until Kevin Williamson at NRO or we picked it up, there were literally dozens of reviews. Nobody mentioned any of this, any of it. Because she is one of the people who they’ve classified as an idol. She is in the star-making machine.
Jeremy Boreing: A black wall of obsidian beyond mockery.
Ben Shapiro: Exactly. And so our job is to tear down that wall for lack of a better phrase.
Jeremy Boreing: So thank you very much for your time this morning. We’re gonna adjourn and let you get to lunch over in the Venetian Ballroom, and as Ben said, we don’t just want to talk about the culture. We actually want to make it. So thank you for your help and for your time.
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