We’re Taking A Different Approach To The Culture Fight. Here’s How.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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It’s been more than 20 years since I first started speaking to conservative groups about the leftist monopoly on the arts. I would tell them that feminine women were being erased from the movies and replaced with fantastical woman-shaped men. I would tell them that all patriots in films are fascists, all businessmen are evil, all religious people are secretly gay, and the only masculine males are gangsters. I would explain that the result of all this artistic propaganda was a generation of young people who neither loved their country nor truly knew themselves.

“The arts … are one of humanity’s most noble enterprises,” I wrote at one point. “They have been hijacked by adherents of a low and oppressive ideology. We should take them back.”

Conservatives everywhere rose up and welcomed me with a single joyful cry of, “What the hell is this person talking about?”

Have things changed since then? A little. More conservatives understand now that the mind of the nation is being deformed by a ceaseless barrage of cultural creations that present the world falsely. But they still don’t quite know how to respond, nor have they embraced the warning I repeated to them so often in those days: “The arts will only be redeemed by those who love them.”

To love the arts is to immerse yourself in beauty even when it disturbs you, to enjoy stories that reveal truths about the human condition even if those truths don’t fit neatly into your political or religious ideology. At their best, the arts are the enemy of certainty, zealotry, and merciless judgment. They are rather, as Hamlet said, a mirror held up to nature, a reflection of messy, love-drunk, sin-riddled, beautiful life. You cannot love the arts as they deserve if your fists are clenched too tightly around an idea of how things ought to be.

In short, love of the arts is a hard sell to partisans on both the Left and the Right. This why my son Spencer Klavan and I are starting a new show at The Daily Wire. “Klavans on the Culture” will try to make that sale. In each episode, we will discuss some of the works of art we think are worth examining: movies, novels, video games, music, whatever has aesthetic value. We’ll talk about what we love, what it means, and what it tells us about our moment and ourselves.

There’ll be no whinging about left-wingery, no complaints about what idiot thing some idiot actor said at the Oscars, and no Oscars for that matter. Just conversations about stuff we like, stuff that moves us, and stuff that gives us a deeper understanding of the world.

Spencer is a brilliant writer and scholar with a PhD in the classics from Oxford University. I’m a multi-award winning and bestselling novelist who studied under Homer. Or maybe it was Virgil. It was a long time ago; I forget. We’ll start by taking a look at the new film version of Andy Weir’s novel “Project Hail Mary.” We’ll review it. We’ll discuss it. And all disagreements will be settled with one of those sword-versus-trident fights that made 1960s “Spartacus” such a great, great film.

I may have made that last part up. But the point is: If you’d like to hear two people who love the arts talk about the arts in a way that will help you love them too, tune in to “Klavans on the Culture.”