- How a Christian Right talk show failed, and how MAGA’s fake Super Bowl halftime show is “pitifully out-of-touch with pop culture”;
- Thoughts about how conservatives have no sense of humor, and how conservatives dominate talk radio;
- Personal thoughts about resistance to change and Heaven, and the idea of Heaven, and how life is a progression of changes;
- News yesterday about how Young Republicans trade racist chats, and how mainstream Republicans defend them, or don’t care;
- Crispin Sartwell asks about woke and MAGA censorship, which is worse?
Granting there may be certain psychological and political themes that distinguish the ‘right’ and the ‘left,’ why would these extend to matters of art?
I noted a piece a couple weeks ago about Christian music, and how lame it is. The writer, Amanda Marcotte, commented,
Contemporary Christian music (CCM) has been around for decades, and yet it remains what it always was — watered down versions of sounds that were popular on the radio years ago.
And,
Popular music may not be satanic, but MAGA is right to see it as mostly liberal. That’s why they fear it. Far from avoiding transcendent artistic experiences, the left can lay claim to most of them. Most everything from Taylor Swift to the grittiest punk music is made by people on the left. That’s why evangelicals want their kids to avoid it. They rightly believe that it’s hard to go back to mediocrity after you’ve tasted excellence.
\\
I have two related pieces today.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 9 Oct 2025: The Christian Right tried to make a late-night talk show—and it bombed spectacularly, subtitled “Eric Metaxas and his backers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to copy Fallon and Kimmel. They forgot to hire talent.”
Beginning:
The ongoing joke about Christian culture is that it’s a sad attempt to replicate everything that’s great about secular culture. Christian movies like God’s Not Dead are bad because they’re more interested in hammering you over the head with a religious message than telling a decent nuanced story (or hiring good actors). Contemporary Christian Music might be catchy but the Jesus-heavy lyrics are so predictable, South Park can spoof it with remarkable accuracy. Even attempts to make overly right-wing sitcoms are embarrassing; it becomes very clear, very quickly, that acting and writing talent are low priorities for the people writing checks.
The bottom line is that when it comes to popular culture, Christians love to create cheap imitations that are never as good as the real thing.
The same apparently goes for late-night talk shows.
The article goes on to discuss how a wealthy conservative group developed a late-night talk show hosted by “conspiracy theorist” Eric Metaxas. Four episodes were filmed; the show wasn’t picked up.
Also covered by the Guardian, here.
\
Then today there’s this, from Amanda Marcotte again.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 15 Oct 2025: MAGA’s fake Super Bowl halftime show reveals their real failures, subtitled “Turning Point USA’s followers are pitifully out-of-touch with pop culture”
About the right’s outrage to Bad Bunny being chosen to host the Super Bowl halftime show early next year.
If you’re looking for an illustration of “coping mechanism,” you’ll find no better example than MAGA’s reaction to Turning Point USA (TPUSA) announcing “The All American Halftime Show,” an alternative to the actual Super Bowl halftime show, airing on Feb. 8. The event doesn’t have a lineup or even a location yet. But what the far-right organization, co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk, does have is a groundswell of racist rage about the real Super Bowl halftime show, which will feature reggaeton star Bad Bunny.
There are contorted excuses for why MAGA is so mad that Bad Bunny, an American citizen born in Puerto Rico, would snag this plum gig. But absolutely no one is confused about the real source of the anger. Mr. Bunny, whose real name is Benito Martínez Ocasio, raps and sings almost exclusively in Spanish. The delicate snowflakes of the right react to that language, which is spoken at home by over 40 million Americans, like it’s the summer sun swiftly melting them into the whiniest vapor imaginable.
Doesn’t the Super Bowl realize that American institutions are reserved for “real” white Christian English-speaking Americans? Didn’t they consult MAGA? (While Bad Bunny is actually one of the most popular stars in the world. And, born in Puerto Rico, is in fact an American.)
Marcotte has examples of predictable MAGA reactions to the selection of Bad Bunny. Then makes some general observations.
All of this reflects what is a small ray of hope in our bleak political moment. MAGA’s relationship with pop culture only has two forms: Complete cluelessness and/or resentment that most people think their taste stinks. This matters, because it’s been a truism on the far-right for decades now that capturing the culture is the key to obtaining their larger political goals. MAGA influencers love to repeat, like parrots, Andrew Breitbart’s motto that “politics is downstream from culture.” The Christian right also has a version of this, which Kirk promoted: The “seven mountains mandate,” which holds that is crucial for conservative Christians to control pop culture. Over the years, untold amounts of money have been poured by right-wing donors and investors into remaking the culture in MAGA’s image, in hopes that will turn American hearts toward authoritarianism and evangelical Christianity.
But they are throwing their money to the wind.
And,
It’s not written in stone that conservatives can’t make art. But MAGA couldn’t be better designed to repel the creative urge. The whole movement is based on a notion that difference is scary, change is bad and everything that’s happened since you were 11 years old is a travesty.
Fearfulness and intellectual laziness are kryptonite to the imagination. How can you think of something new when your ideological position is that everything new is bad?
\\
(Meanwhile there have been announcements that Turning Point USA will host its *own* halftime show, but Marcotte’s title says this is “fake” and she refers to a “mocked up fantasy poster.” And how “Not realizing they were the butt of the joke, Trump voters went nuts sharing the flier.” A Google search shows no specifics about such a show.)
\\\
Follow-on thoughts. It’s long been observed that conservatives have no sense of humor. They operate in a perpetual attitude of stern outrage. Trump only jokes or laughs when he’s putting someone down. (Contrast the sunnier attitude of Obama.)
Further the observation about TV talk shows isn’t true about talk radio, which is overwhelmingly conservatives. Dominated by angry white men, railing at enemies outside their tribe, and complicated things they don’t understand about the world. Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, no doubt many others. While attempt to create analogous left-leaning shows have failed. Why? Something to do with who more often listens to radio, perhaps.
\\\
Related thought. Do conservatives resist change because they believe in heaven? Which presumably is an unchanging eternal paradise? Of course this raises all sorts of questions about the nature of heaven. Is it a continuation of the life you led on Earth? If so, at what age? The age you died, or some ideal you as you were at middle-age, or in your vigorous 20s? Like change or not, every life is a progression of changes, from childhood to young adulthood to parenthood and so on, and there’s no denying it. But my go-to argument against the idea of heaven is: forever?? Once in heaven you’re in some ideal state that never changes? Never?? Wouldn’t you get unutterably bored? Or would you become a sort of zombie, immune to boredom, and insensitive to a static, never-ending existence? In which case it wouldn’t be much like your life on Earth, would it? Because actual life is a never-ending series of challenges to overcome. The conventional Christian idea of heaven strikes me as an inability to appreciate the implications of long-term existence.
I have a book about challenging Christians abut their beliefs, and I will see what it says.
\\\
The scandal of the week among Republicans is not unrelated to the above pieces.
Politico, 14 Oct 2025: ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat, subtitled “Thousands of private messages reveal young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape.”
Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.
“Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued.
This, needless to say, is rank tribalism and demonization of outsiders, of anyone different than white Christian males. If there’s any humor here, if they can be said to making jokes, it’s only at the expense of people they hate, as in the Trump example above.
\
This story broke there at Politico, but since has spread over the news media. Here’s just one response.
Slate, Tess Owen, 15 Oct 2025: Is It Cool to Say “I Love Hitler”? The Republican Party Is Trying to Decide., subtitled “Vice President J.D. Vance has weighed in…”
Thousands of pages of Telegram chats obtained by Politico laid bare what young Republican leaders talk about in private: They use racial slurs with abandon, they make vile jokes about rape and gas chambers, and they say they love Hitler.
It’s become de rigueur in such stories to include a paragraph like this:
In another time, the leaked messages from leaders of young Republican groups across the U.S. might have constituted a major bombshell or a scandal for the GOP, perhaps even ushered in a period of serious self-reflection. Instead, the response has highlighted the ongoing tussle between MAGA and the increasingly weak Republican establishment over the soul of the GOP and whether normalized racism, antisemitism, and violent speech have a place in it.
Some states have responded by shutting down “Young Republican” groups; some participants of the chats have been fired from their jobs. Today sites have posted the full list of folks participating in those chats. (Yet again, is it any more fair to fire some of them from their jobs than to relieve Jimmy Kimmel of his show? Who decides what’s permissible speech? I would say, let them all speak, and let the public judge the speakers by their words.)
Back to the article, to the point:
But the response from MAGA influencers—including Vice President J.D. Vance—has so far followed a familiar script: peddling whataboutism, denying, downplaying, or shifting blame. Some even celebrated the chats: “Not only am I ok with what was said in the group chat, those messages have my full endorsement,” posted Alex Rosen, an internet personality who conducts “sting operations” against suspected pedophiles, to his 480,000 followers on X.
…
Vance doubled down on his position in an appearance on the network Real America’s Voice on Wednesday afternoon. “Grow up! Focus on the real issues. Don’t focus on what kids say in group chat,” Vance said. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys—they tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.
“We live in a digital world,” he added. “We’re not canceling kids because they do something stupid in a group chat.”
Fine, as I just said. That doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t judge them, and judge those who excuse them.
\\\
One more, for this post, since it’s related.
Washington Post, opinion by Crispin Sartwell, 13 Oct 2025: As a professor, I’ve seen woke and MAGA censorship. Which is worse?, subtitled “Both attacks on free speech are devastating for academia, but in different ways.”
He appears to answer in his first two paragraphs.
It didn’t take long for professors to point out that the right-wing wave of restrictions on expression, spurred by the Trump administration, is far worse than those characteristic of “the woke era.” After all, the woke restrictions were primarily internal, a matter of academic practice, as students, administrators and professors tried to eliminate any shred of skepticism toward diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. It was annoying — and devastating if you were fired or publicly shamed. In my view, it led to a dramatic decline in the quality of research.
But MAGA restrictions appear far more serious, as the administration threatens to withhold federal funds on ideological grounds, attempts to make colleges pledge themselves to Trumpian orthodoxy, drives university presidents from their jobs and vilifies the work of professors or students in a way that shames or even endangers them. This is direct governmental free-speech suppression, which is just what the founders of the American republic wanted to prevent: The First Amendment prohibits the government but not, say, private universities from restricting speech.
But it’s not as simple as that. The pressure for conformity, so as not to upset the students or the funders, has infiltrated academia. This is what books like The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt (reviewed here), and The Canceling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Schlott (not yet read) are about.
I think the period of my career (roughly 1990 to 2023) corresponded to a collapse in the quality of research and publication in philosophy and other humanities and social science disciplines. In 1980, there were big, distinctive and idiosyncratic philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, W.V.O. Quine, Arthur Danto and Judith Jarvis Thomson. By 2010, their voices had been muted, and perhaps no one as bold as they were could have survived grad school. My impression is that many practitioners of other disciplines feel roughly the same. Academic production is more homogenous, blander, safer and less sincere.
