“You seem to cover a lot more stuff about Hollywood and video games than politics,” my dad said, noting that he’d noticed that shift in my writing himself.

He and his friend are right. While RedState is a primarily political site, I consider the conservative fight to be far broader than what the Biden administration is doing or what the latest attempt to force CRT into schools looked like. Rest assured, I think talking about these things is very, very important, but if I’m being very honest, after years of covering this stuff it started to feel like a spinning wheel in the mud.

Andrew Breitbart once famously said that politics was downstream of culture. He wasn’t at all wrong. Politics is a symptom of a disease you choose to have…or in some cases, that disease is forced upon you without your noticing.

It’s my experience that no one is born a Democrat but the vast majority of young people become one by default. They’re so soaked in pro-Democrat messaging from very early on that by the time they even register that politics is something they should pay attention to even a little bit, they’re far more friendly to the left than they are to the right if friendliness for the right is even on the menu.

This wasn’t an accident. The left is very good at messaging, especially to the youth. The over-dramatic nature of Democrat messaging speaks to the dynamism of youth. They often talk of a brave new future that has to be fought for against those stuffy conservatives, all of whom are perfect representations of the disapproving adults in “Footloose.”

Democrats attach themselves to children (increasingly this is less of a figurative statement) through popular culture very early on while conservatives tend to begin their messaging far later. Sadly, the majority of kids are non-practicing Democrats for the majority of their young lives. Going through the public education system, which has become infested with radical leftists, only makes a kid’s resistance to Democrat suggestions that much weaker.

Add onto the fact that corporations like Disney are doing their absolute best to inject social justice concepts and beliefs into your child and you have something of a gauntlet that would be very difficult for your child to get through unscathed.

By the time they hit their mid-twenties, many people are pulling the lever for Democrats without even knowing why.

But the “why” isn’t hard to figure out. They were impacted by the culture. Every show they watched had something in it that drew them further and further into the Democrat’s camp. Every movie they saw seduced them a little more. Every American comic book dosed them with ideas that made it easier to slip in others. By the time their woke university professors get to them, they’re primed for indoctrination.

But what if they could be headed off from the beginning? What if every show, game, book, or movie could be viewed at through a lens of common sense first so you could see the pitfalls? What if the people behind these attempts at brainwashing could be exposed and their ridiculousness laid bare? What if you knew where the fight was in the culture war as it was happening instead of hearing about it later when the dust has settled and the establishment won because no one showed up to fight them?

This is why I tend to focus on cultural matters. I want to treat the disease before it becomes too hard to cure. I want to give people a fighting chance by fighting on a battlefield far larger than the one in Washington.

This is why I want to address the claims made by a Disney cartoon about slavery’s credit in the building of this country so the social justice narrative doesn’t take root.

This is why I cover the love of two professional NFL players for their mother in order to display the warmth and power of the nuclear family.

This is why I discuss the culture war happening around a video game that defies the woke mob so you can see the power regular people have over would-be social dictators.

This is why I cover the machinations of showrunners who want to include socio-political messaging in popular television shows.

This is why I analyze the comic book industry’s direction when it comes to the superheroes we all grew up on.

It’s because if I can help win battles here, then maybe we’ll have fewer battles to fight there. So the next time you wonder why I’m covering something that doesn’t seem to fit on a political site, just know that it does. It really does.