It doesn’t take much to change a culture. The right band at the right time (the Beatles), a novel that won’t be censored (Ulysses), and a show like Saturday Night Live, launched on a shoestring budget and airing in a “dead spot” late at night in 1975. These things don’t need huge support. They do need the right support at the right time.
For the last 50 years, conservatives who want to create a healthier culture have missed opportunity after opportunity to do just that. Conservatives are great at position papers, conferences, and airy arguments about natural law and the Constitution. They are lousy at the hand-to-hand combat that can eventually change a culture.
A conservative I recently spoke with put it well. This person is a brilliant thinker, the author of important books, but says something more is needed in 2024 — what he calls “a warrior element.” We need people who will fight, block by block, to change the culture.
The divide between the elite conservative thinkers and the “warrior element” recently came into stark relief. Conservative thinker Ryan Anderson, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, published a long essay in First Things magazine. “The Way Forward After Dobbs” outlines what is needed to transform culture into one that elevates rather than degrades. “We now need culture-forming, opinion-shaping organizations,” Anderson wrote. “What might this entail? We might task a small group with studying how other groups have succeeded in their domains, and devising a plan for meaningful reforms in new areas.”
Anderson argues that what is needed is a cultural equivalent of “what the Federalist Society did to reform the judiciary, and what Alliance Defending Freedom has done to create a generation of elite socially conservative lawyers through its Blackstone Legal Fellowship.” He goes on to state that “ideas aren’t the only things that have consequences. So, too, do social practices, habits, virtues and vices, the movies and TV shows we watch, the music we listen to, and the events the youth ministry and young adult groups sponsor.”
What is needed then is a “cultural incrementalism” that “can be broad-spectrum: new TV shows and movies that aren’t hokey after-school specials, policies to protect kids from the harms of social media and online pornography, effective church ministries. The task is enormous. But we haven’t devoted enough time, treasure, or sophistication to it.”
This is all true and good as far as it goes. Yet often, when it comes time to take the battlefield at a crucial time, the conservative elite are AWOL.
The week I read Anderson’s essay, The Ford/Hill Project, a new play about Christine Blasey Ford and Anita Hill, was mounted. It was created by and stars a group of A-list Hollywood actors and will play for elites in Washington for two days before heading to New York. The Ford/Hill Project is exactly the kind of thing that the Left is great at. It will feed a false propagandistic narrative into the bloodstream of the culture. It will get widely and favorably reviewed and perhaps filmed. The actors are like warriors — tough, trained, and able to carry out their mission.
They are also broadcasting a false message. The Ford/Hill Project is like The Laramie Project, the play about the murdered gay man Matthew Shepard that turned out to be based on false sources. When investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez concluded in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard that the 1998 murder of Shepard was not an anti-gay hate crime but could be blamed on crystal meth, a drug that was flooding Denver at the time of Shepard’s death, liberals did not accept it. “People object to the idea of the book, rather than what is in the book,” Jimenez told one reporter. “The anger directed at me has been pretty extreme.”
I know how he feels. When I read about The Ford/Hill Project, I was, as the liberals say, triggered. I was smeared during the Kavanaugh nomination. After writing a book, several articles, and partaking in a documentary called Judge and the Justice on Fox Nation about the ordeal, I was done. Friends, family and editors I trust told me to move on, and I agreed. I wanted to write about music, skateboarding, and other things I love. It was over.
Then, last week, the Washington Post wrote a glowing piece about The Ford/Hill Project. Leading the piece was a scene from the play in which one of the lead actors reads verbatim from the Senate testimony of Ford. Elizabeth Marvel, the actress and creator of The Ford/Hill Project, was, in Ford’s voice, describing allegedly being sexually assaulted by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh while I, or so Ford alleged, looked on. Despite my books, articles, and TV spots, despite my being smeared, and despite my talking to the FBI for three hours, the Left was absolutely determined to push this narrative. In The Devil’s Triangle, I reveal how the Democrats had used extortion, witness tampering, death threats, and false accusations to destroy us. They were dirty fighters, but they were fighters.
The Ford/Hill Project isn’t about the intellectual abstractions of Ryan Anderson. It’s hand-to-hand combat. I wrote a piece about the play and my reaction and said that I wanted to attend the opening night of the play, even though the tickets were $175. Culture-transforming works don’t often require a lot of money, just the right amount at the right time. A VIP pass would even allow me to talk to the cast and creator. I could actually meet them on the field of battle. I could challenge a liberal narrative before it took hold in the culture.
It wouldn’t be easy. I had lost jobs because of my brief fame, including at conservative and even Catholic organizations that should have shown more backbone. In October 2020, the Catholic writer Joseph Bottom sent out a tweet: “The treatment of @markgjudge was awful, and the failure of those who published him to defend him was among the most despicable — so he ends up washing dishes.” Conservatives acted like I had never existed. Writing in National Review in 2021, editor Charles C.W. Cooke recounted the 2018 attack on Kavanaugh: “Sometime soon, the hideous standards that were crafted and reinforced by those attempting to bring down Kavanaugh will be used against someone with no power, money, name recognition, or institutional backing.” Those “hideous standards” were already deployed against someone without power, money, name recognition or institutional standards. That person was me.
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In January 2023, I was attending a function at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. There, I spotted Ryan Anderson. I walked over, said hello, and handed him a copy of The Devil’s Triangle. I was trying to warn him that this is a war and we need warriors.
I never heard back from Anderson.