After sitting through roughly 20 (so far) hours of me playing the new video game Far Cry 4 on my PS4, my long-suffering wife emailed me this purported game review of FC4 by the popular site AVClub.  I say “purported” game review because several paragraphs in, I still had not found a single sentence explaining whether the game was fun to play or not. Rather, the entire article serves solely as a screed against the ways in which the game’s narrative offends leftist sensibilities, to the point where one is left to wonder whether the author has ever played a video game before, or understands the entire point of video games or escapism in general. The stated objection to the game is its violence (NB – the game is in fact violent and responsible parents will keep it away from younger children), but a deeper examination reveals that the author does not object to violence per se at all, but merely violence of the kind that triggers the author’s racial/cultural/speciesist guilt. It’s offensive to my sensibilities that a review of a video game written by a liberal no longer needs to even engage the question of whether the game is good as a video game or not, but rather only whether it is sufficiently inoffensive to liberals or not.

It’s difficult being a consumer of popular entertainment as a conscientious conservative. Hollywood is so infested with liberals and Democrat activists that it’s difficult to go to a movie at all without feeling like you are contributing money to someone who will immediately turn around and donate it to either a Democrat or Planned Parenthood. Many companies are likewise entwined in Democrat or liberal organizations, and then there’s the increasing willingness of professional athletes to enter the fray. Faced with this myriad of potential pitfalls, many conservatives I know have thrown up their hands at the entire thing and declared that they don’t care and aren’t willing to try anymore. I’ve even heard some claim (falsely) that “boycotts are a left-wing tactic” as a way to excuse participating in any at all.

Personally, I have always felt that unilateral disarmament with respect to any tactic is a sucker’s game and is sure to hasten defeat. And make no mistake, the liberals have no intention of ceding an inch of this territory. In fact, if anything, their determination to impose doctrinal hegemony on every medium of entertainment is evident more than ever. Witness the screeching leveled at SNL for their relatively mild and humorous criticism of Obama’s executive amnesty, the public castigation of Tim Tebow and Tony Dungy (compared to the total sports media indifference to the fact that Pete Carroll is a 9/11 truther), the howling over Chick Fil A CEO Dan Cathey’s remarks, and the increasing avalanche of public pressure brought to bear on literally every medium (including, yes, video games) any time someone steps a toe out of line with respect to left wing doctrine.

Not everyone who produces entertainment is doctrinally left wing, believe it or not. Many are, but a large mass are mostly indifferent to politics. Their natural inclination would be to produce material that is apolitical, or at least not consciously political. But rest assured that if they only feel pressure from one direction – if only the threat of lost business from the left looms (and never the right) – then soon not only entertainment, but also sports teams and major companies will inevitably  do nothing ever but tilt left and donate their money to left wing causes. The inevitable result of this is not a future in which conservative ideas have a chance at winning in the public marketplace. Like it or not, we need some check on these institutions to prevent them at the very least from being actively leftist.

I realize it can be difficult and overwhelming sometimes to know where to draw the line. I definitely don’t look up every product I buy to ensure complete compliance with everything I believe in, but I am definitely willing to refuse to give a company my money if they basically dare me to quit using their service by publicly supporting left wing causes. I don’t donate to March of Dimes because they are really super fond of killing in utero kids. I don’t go see Dreamworks movies because I know that I might as well be writing a check directly to the DNC when I do. And after Susan G. Komen caved to Planned Parenthood, I don’t buy anything with a pink ribbon on it.

It used to be that companies feared going openly left wing and publicly throwing their support behind those causes because there was a cohesive network of conservative shoppers that would punish them in the pocketbook for doing so. Nowadays they clearly don’t because the only such cohesive network is on the left. If this trend continues, we won’t be standing athwart history yelling “stop” for very much longer.