To borrow moderately from Gerald Ford, I think it would be fair to describe the state of our culture today as “not good.” Popular movies, music, books, and television are all agents of cultural destruction. They spread pernicious notions about our history and our government. By example, they erode our moral values.

I think it’s significant to remember the whole Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown “scandal” of 1992. For those who don’t remember, this is basically what happened. Vice President Quayle (a man who never caught a break if there ever was one) criticized the television program Murphy Brown on the not-unreasonable basis that, by depicting the title character as happily having a child out of wedlock, it was contributing to a general moral decline and, worse, it was unrealistically suggesting that single motherhood was an easy thing. Shortly thereafter, all of the legions of post-modern moralists descended upon the Vice President for his insensitivity and, in essence, turned the whole thing into a gigantic joke.

What I find most notable about the whole thing is this: it was only twelve years ago. It was recent enough that I can remember following the story. Consider that for a second. Think about just how much has changed in so short a period of time. A female character having a child out of wedlock on television today is a totally unremarkable event. As a matter of fact, one of the few major television shows with what might be characterized as a strong family message, The Gilmore Girls, revolves around a character who had a child while both unmarried and a teenager. This fact is treated simply as a matter of course and as, other than her relative youth, entirely unremarkable. Where Vice President Quayle was mostly attacked by the left in 1992, if Vice President Cheney made such remarks today he would be attacked by everybody.

Television matters. It’s an agent of change in our society. Virtually everyone in the country watches television and more people than not watch several hours of the stuff a day. In the absence of other institutions which once defined the realms of personal behavior (most notably the Church- but also other traditional community groups, which were once much stronger) is has become the central regulator of our values.

Don’t believe me? Well, just watch. Frankly, I’m quite confident that if NBC were to air a pro-incest sitcom which turned into a mega-hit (All in the Family: 2004?), it wouldn’t be more than two months before newspaper op-ed pages started filling with columns with titles like “Incest is the Best” and New York Times editorials with titles like “Individual Choice.” I have no doubt at all that the rise in support for homosexuality can be directly linked to the amount of pro-gay content on TV (rather than the amount of pro-gay content on TV linked to popular support for homosexuality).

This definitively does not mean that the people themselves approve of homosexuality or of any of this rest of this. A Gallup Poll in May of 2003 showed that 46% of adults think that having a baby outside of marriage is morally wrong. The same poll said that 52% of people think that homosexual behavior is immoral.

When people bother to ask (and they often don’t, because they don’t know what the answers will be) they find that a significant minority thinks that homosexual acts themselves ought to be illegal. One 2003 Quinnipiac survey found that 35% of Pennsylvanians feel that way. The same level of opposition was found in a national Gallup survey from the same time period.

So: if more than half of the people think that gay behavior is immoral, if a third want it to be illegal, and if roughly half of all people think that it’s immoral to have a child out of wedlock: why aren’t these views being reflected on our televisions screens?

Why do people sit by as their culture is transformed into something alien to them? It’s simple: they’re scared. They don’t see the polling data that I and others see. They only know what they know. They only see what they see spewing from television and on movie screens and in the newspapers. So they think that they’re alone. They think that they’re the only ones that feel that way. Thus it is that those who would normally set the boundaries of what is acceptable in civil society stand aside and thereby are those who would destroy all limits given a licence to advance their cause and ennobled by the incorrect belief that they are in the majority.

When I raised the example of incest above, it wouldn’t be accepted because most people would approve of it. It would be accepted because people who didn’t approve would be too frightened of the stabs of the pseudo-moral majority to speak. It’s just the same with homosexuality: it isn’t that more people suddenly want to engage in gay acts than did decades ago (though, I suppose, that might be a factor as well in some cases) it’s that they feel free to do so because those who would normally condemn them are too afraid to do so openly. People are afraid to defend the borders of our culture because they believe that they would be alone in doing so.

Forget the politics of it: there’s a business opportunity here. There’s money to be made here. Look at how quickly the Fox News Channel and Rush Limbaugh came to dominate their respective fields. In both cases it was for a simple reason. People who had previously been forced to accept the products of a cultural monopoly heard something new and, on hearing it, had a single thought: “this is what I think, but am afraid to say.”

That, in fact, is the most common e-mail comment I get (well, save for, “I hope you die of Ebola” or some variation on that theme). It’s exactly how other Rush fans that I speak to describe the moment of revelation. It was how I felt the moment I started reading a friend’s copy of The Way Things Ought to Be sitting in a sixth-grade classroom at lunch on a rainy day in 1994. From that moment on, I knew that I was a conservative and a Republican and that I’d be one for life. Better than that (at least from Rush’s perspective) I also knew that I was going to go out that afternoon and use some of the money I earned delivering newspapers to buy a copy of See, I Told You So and that soon I’d be staying up until Midnight to watch Rush’s television show on a Fox affiliate out of Seattle and that I’d be finely tuning a portable radio to, throughout the day, listen to a static-filled version of his show as played on a radio station in distant Bellingham.

I don’t think that anyone can deny that a conservative entertainment television network would be financially lucrative. Look at the success of The Passion of the Christ. People lined up to watch that movie not only because they wanted to see the story of Jesus Christ and not only because Mel Gibson was involved, but because seeing the movie was an act of cultural affirmation and solidarity. People went to see the movie because, in so doing, they wanted to show what side of the culture war they were on.

The fact that nearly a year has passed without another studio trying to follow up on that says something. So does the fact that no studio has seriously attempted to produce a pro-War on Terror film. It says that the present bosses of Hollywood care more about ideology than they care about money. Fine. That’s their prerogative.

But we have our rights as well. We’ve got room to make money and to promote the things that, in our hearts, all decent men know to be right.

In the days to come, I’m going to talk more about the need for a conservative counter-culture as part of an all out effort to reduce and destroy the last real bastions of left-wing control in this country.

We’ve got a good power base in half of the institutions which matter: the Federal Government, the State Governments, and the Military. Now we need to take back the universities, the television networks, the newspapers, and the movie studios. The time is ripe and our cause is just. Deus vult.