The Renaissance of Conservative Media

TV sure has changed a lot in the past six decades. During my parents’ childhood, few television programs existed besides westerns and sitcoms.  Keep in mind that both my parents had one television set despite sharing a house with seven other people.  Most of the sitcoms promoted bourgeois culture, a concept that the post-modernist liberals have done everything to deconstruct and disassemble.  The earliest sitcoms, such as “Leave it to Beaver,” portrayed the nuclear family in a positive light, with a loving, supportive, engaged, and married mother and father committed to teaching their children the difference between right and wrong. 

The earliest late night shows had little in common with today’s politically charged late night programming.  A producer for “The Ed Sullivan Show,” a variety show that aired on CBS, ordered The Rolling Stones to change the refrain of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.”  The Stones begrudgingly complied, unlike The Doors, who refused to clean up the line from their song “Light My Fire”, “girl we could not get much higher.”  The Doors never again appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”  On today’s late night shows, vulgarity has become the norm.  For example, “Late Night” host Stephen Colbert once referred to President Trump as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “c***-holster.” 

The Cultural Revolution forever changed the nature of American television.  For the past half century or so, liberals have effectively had a chokehold on television programming, either subtly or explicitly. As liberals understand better than conservatives that politics flows downstream from culture, liberals have effectively used the “boob tube” to advance their political agenda.  The late EWTN Personality Mother Angelica once referred to television as “The Devil’s Tabernacle.”  Popular TV shows have promoted or glorified drug use, single motherhood, same-sex relationships, sexual promiscuity and abortions.  All of these hedonistic ideas might sound good on paper but they do not lead to fulfilling and productive lives.  Maybe the over-consumption of these types of TV series has led to the creation of a “lost, confused and angry people” as explained by Lauren Southern.                

Apparently running out of ideas, TV executives decided to resurrect long-cancelled TV shows during the 2017-2018 season.  After eleven years off the air, NBC began distributing a reboot of “Will and Grace.”  While the show always had liberal sympathies, the reboot made sure to toss plenty of red meat to the Anti-Trump army.  The premiere episode of the reboot focused on the main characters decorating the Oval Office and ended with a close-up of a “Make America Gay Again” hat on President Trump’s desk. 

More than twenty years after its series finale, ABC decided to add a reboot of the long-running sitcom “Roseanne” to its Tuesday night programming.  To the extent that the star of the eponymous TV show, Roseanne Barr, has a political pedigree, it has always leaned on the left end of the spectrum.  She ran for President in 2012 for the Peace and Freedom Party, basically the preferred political party of Code Pink.  While the party places special emphasis on avoiding military intervention, the rest of its politics closely mirror that of the Green Party. Barr had sought the Green Party nomination, but she ended up losing to Jill Stein.  Because the Peace and Freedom Party did not have ballot access in her home state of Hawaii, Barr ended up voting for President Obama.

In 2016, however, Barr found herself sympathetic to President Trump.  She found common cause with his opposition to meddling in foreign countries and nation-building as well as his strong support for the Nation of Israel.  Her ex-husband Tom Arnold, on the other hand, has sided with #TheResistance, as evidenced by his tweets attacking Candace Owens.    

Barr tried to explain to a flabbergasted Jimmy Kimmel her reason for supporting President Trump, whom he referred to as “Capt. Whacko” in spite of her socially liberal views: “you all moved – you all went so f*cking far out you lost everyone.”  The Democrats’ Trump Derangement Syndrome has turned off many people who might otherwise agree with some of their policy positions.    

While the reboot of “Will & Grace” pandered to a liberal audience, the reboot of “Roseanne,” focused on appealing to the other half of America.  The premiere episode featured a contentious Thanksgiving dinner between Roseanne, a Trump supporter in the series, and her sister Jackie, a liberal donning a “nasty woman” T-shirt.  “Roseanne” focused on a working-class family in Illinois; therefore, it should not have come as a surprise that the protagonist would support President Trump.  When “Roseanne” first aired in the 1990s, much of the working class supported Democratic candidates.  Today, the working class in the Midwest makes up an essential part of the Trump coalition, as they realized that the Democrats no longer care about their issues, they have instead decided to focus on pleasing their new constituencies: illegal immigrants and angry feminists. 

“Roseanne” did quite well in the ratings, its strongest media markets included Tulsa, Oklahoma, Cincinnati, Ohio and Kansas City, Missouri.  The New York and Los Angeles Media markets did not even make it into the top 20.  Apparently, they still prefer the progressive shows such as “Modern Family” and “Will & Grace.” 

The success of the “Roseanne” reboot probably led some at ABC to regret deciding not to renew the sitcom “Last Man Standing” for a seventh season.  The show, starring “Home Improvement” star Tim Allen, focuses on a conservative businessman who lives with his wife and three daughters, all but one of whom have left-leaning political views.  The show featured political back-and-forth about the hot political topics of the day, including the 2012 Presidential election and the ongoing battle about political correctness.

After ABC pulled the plug on “Last Man Standing” citing a scheduling conflict, the search began for a new home.  Initially, it looked like the show would move to CMT, which airs reruns of the sitcom. However, that did not pan out.  Just weeks after “Roseanne” returned to the silver screen with success, Fox announced that it will pick up “Last Man Standing” for a seventh season.

In recent years, independently funded Christian films have performed quite well at the box office, much to the surprise of the limousine liberals who run Hollywood.  Maybe Hollywood has finally taken notice.  Liberals definitely did not like it when Entertainment Studios decided to bankroll the film “Chappaquiddick,” as it paints an unflatteringly accurate picture of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, a Saint in the Church of Liberalism.  Four years after he wrote the Immigration Bill that Democrats now refer to as the “Kennedys’ greatest gift to the Democratic Party,” Kennedy accidentally drove Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge after a party on Martha’s Vineyard’s Chappaquidick Island celebrating the “Boiler Room Girls,” a group of single women who had worked on his brother Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Presidential Campaign.  Realizing that involvement in an automobile accident could derail his Presidential ambitions, Kennedy deserted the scene, failing to report the accident until after the police had already found Kopechne’s body submerged in the pond.  Kennedy eventually plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.  “Chappaquiddick” first hit theaters on April 6, a little more than two months after Ted Kennedy’s great nephew, Congressman Joe Kennedy III, gave the Democratic response to the State of the Union in front of an old car in a high school shop classroom in Fall River, Massachusetts.  Maybe he didn’t see the irony. 

Kennedy did run for President in the 1980 Presidential Election against Incumbent President Jimmy Carter.  He ultimately failed to capture the Democratic nomination and many historians believe the Chappaquiddick institute dealt a fatal blow to his hopes of becoming President of the United States.  Still, Kennedy won re-election to the Senate seven more times following the Chappaquiddick incident and achieved the coveted goal of sainthood in the Church of Liberalism.      

Those who liked to turn to awards shows for a reprieve from the explosive political discourse did not find any reprieve in 2017.  The 2017 Emmy Awards, which devoted an enormous amount of time to Trump bashing, tied with the 2016 Emmy Awards for the lowest-rated Primetime Emmy Awards ever.  At the Stephen Colbert-hosted 2017 Emmys, liberal shows such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” took away most of the awards while Lily Tomlin and “Hanoi Jane” Fonda referred to President Trump as a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”   

In addition to much of America, many “Saturday Night Live” alumni have also grown weary of Hollywood’s liberal bias.  Joe Piscopo, who impersonated Frank Sinatra during his relatively short tenure on “SNL,” did not appreciate the inclusion of Stormy Daniels in a cold open earlier this month, where she has a conversation with President Trump, played by Alec Baldwin.  President Trump asked her “What do you need for this to all go away?,”  she responded “a resignation.” Baldwin despises President Trump and he makes that very clear with his impersonation of the President.  Rob Schneider explained that Dana Carvey, who impersonated President George H.W. Bush, “always had empathy for the people he played, and Alec Baldwin has nothing but a fuming, seething anger towards the person he plays.”

In the wake of the renaissance of conservative media, it looks like many more stars have mustered up the courage to admit that they support President Trump and conservative principles.  Rapper Kanye West tweeted out his support for conservative activist Candace Owens and later, President Trump.  Perhaps coincidentally, the President’s approval rating with black men has risen to 22 percent. 

Maybe Hollywood will start noticing the popularity of conservative, or just non-liberal programming, and respond to the free market by marketing more shows and movies geared towards conservatives.  In the meantime, conservatives can enjoy watching “Roseanne” or “Last Man Standing,” both of which enjoy enormous popularity for bucking the trends of political correctness.