The War of Ideas Is Won by Producers, Not Preachers

"The left don't breed — they'll die out on their own." Not merely a comforting delusion, but an extremely dangerous idea. Slave-making ants (Polyergus) ^[1] don't bother with offspring either — they steal pupae from other colonies, and the hatchlings emerge inside the raider's nest, considering it home. Birth rate zero, population growing. Familiar model? But the main danger of this thesis is not that it's false — it's that it sedates. It lulls conservatives while they diligently feed children into someone else's cultural environment — turning into a bio-factory for progressivism.

The premises offered by conservative circles are correct: falling birth rates, moral erosion, economic decline. The conclusions drawn from them are wrong. Because saying "people forgot God and therefore are dying out" is like saying "the patient is sick because he fell ill" — and the prescribed treatment is predictably artless: read the diagnosis backwards — "they need to remember God." That's not a strategy, not even a tactic — it's an incantation. But the question behind it is real. Let me try to answer it differently.

In the past, the church was the most effective system for distributing meaning — temples, rituals, painting, music. The meanings haven't gotten worse — but a temple holds hundreds, while a screen reaches millions. Competitors built more powerful distribution channels; conservatives built none. A preacher or propagandist with a YouTube channel is a step in the right direction, but it's cottage industry. On the other side — a vast industry: hundreds of studios, thousands of screenwriters, billion-dollar budgets. The problem is not the quality of ideas. The problem is the scale and diversity of content that delivers them.

People behave as fashion dictates. Not more, but not less.

Not as reason prescribes, not as commandments dictate — but as they are shown. Fashion is produced by directors, screenwriters, actors, marketers — the entertainment industry. Hollywood, Netflix, TikTok. Whoever controls the entertainment industry sets the behavioral norm. A single Netflix series — The Queen's Gambit — brought three million new players to Chess.com in one month ^[2]. Chess — a game with one of the highest cognitive loads. If a single series can make chess fashionable — making Hegel fashionable probably takes two. Humans are imitative creatures before they are thinking ones. That's not an insult — it's an operational characteristic you can and should design with.

On the side of atomization and nihilism — trillions. Some — a byproduct of the dopamine economy. Some — targeted investments: Disney turned from a family studio into an ideological factory ^[15], endowments fund departments for deconstructing traditional values. Into the industry of family and long-term meaning — virtually nothing. The combined budget of all conservative studios doesn't reach the annual budget of Netflix alone. The conservative elite still doesn't consider culture a priority (curiously, Ortega defined aristocracy as the class bearing responsibility for civilization — and immediately shifted blame onto the masses, who by his own definition decide nothing) ^[5].

Gramsci called this hegemony ^[4] — dominance not through command, but through a norm the majority accepts as its own. Without Hollywood, he would have stayed in the library. A philosopher formulates an idea, the screen translates it for millions, the university turns it into theory, HR turns it into policy. And the screen is the only link in this chain that can be built from scratch faster than any other.

USSR. Pants fell down — but the Soviet state stood. What held it together?

An objectively dysfunctional economy — the rejection of the market — held for seventy years. Civil war, Cheka firing squads, collectivization, famine, the Gulag, World War II, postwar ruin — and then poverty again. Pioneers tied red scarves around inappropriate places, the people told jokes, every nail got stolen from the factory. Nobody believed in the ideology. But the system was accepted as the only reality — and that's far more important than belief. The cultural machine filled the entire space of imagination. People couldn't conceive of an alternative — and lived inside the offered worldview.

It didn't collapse from insight. Ninety-one was a revolt of empty pots, not a rebellion against ideology. In the March referendum, three-quarters voted to preserve the Union ^[6] — not because they loved communism, but because they couldn't imagine any other life.

If an absurd idea — take and redistribute — held for three generations on cultural machinery alone, imagine what could be built with a deeply considered ideology.

Israel. The economy says "no" — but grandma already picked a name.

The standard argument — children are expensive, so people don't have them — is frankly weak. A moldy two-room flat in Haifa costs three hundred thousand dollars. For that money in Texas — a house with a yard. Yet the birth rate is nearly three children per woman ^[7]. Not because they're wealthier. Because the cultural norm overrides economic logic.

Where does this norm come from? It didn't arise on its own — but neither was it created by cinema. It was created by the environment in the fullest sense: existential threat, where demography is a matter of national survival. The army as a shared experience binding generations. A community where childlessness is an anomaly, not a choice. A family where grandma asks "when?" the day after the wedding. Media reflect and reinforce this norm — but they didn't create it.

All of this is not metaphysics. It's meaning engineering: army, community, everyday culture, media — every element transmits the same message. And it works — despite the economy, despite housing prices, despite everything that should have collapsed the birth rate. Politicians don't need to campaign for birth rates — culture did it for them.

But Israel has what conservative America doesn't: army, community, shared destiny. In an atomized society where all this has been destroyed, one channel remains capable of transmitting a norm to millions — the screen. Not as a replacement for community — but as the only way to regrow one.

Poland. Church full. Maternity ward empty.

One of the most religious countries in Europe. Church, tradition, eight years of the conservative PiS government. Birth rate — 1.1 (GUS, 2024) ^[8]. Religion in place — but the children are gone. The priest still says the right things — but his congregation sits in their phones watching Netflix. A Sunday sermon loses to an evening series on every metric: reach, engagement, frequency of contact, production quality. God didn't leave Poland. He wasn't cancelled, banned, or expelled — He was outcompeted. The competitors had a bigger budget, brighter picture, and a subscription more convenient than a tithe.

South Korea — mirror confirmation: a world-class cultural machine, but transmitting the same atomization — and the birth rate is 0.7 ^[9]. The machine works. The question is what it transmits.

Truth without packaging — product without a shelf.

Conservative ideas are losing not because family and children are a bad product. The epidemic of antidepressants, loneliness, and suicides in the most "liberated" societies is itself an indicator of demand for a meaningful life — and it's off the charts. But there is no competitively packaged offer. The best directors and actors work on packaging the opposite idea. Not because they believe in nihilism — but because that's where the pay is, that's where they get to work — and because dissent in the industry costs a career. With this resource imbalance, counting on sermons and nostalgia is like treating cancer with memories of health.

Conservative donors exist — and spend billions. Money is there. But it all goes to tactics: senators, election campaigns, lobbyists, think tanks — everything that yields measurable results in the next election cycle. Nothing goes to strategy. Not a single comparable investment in a film studio, film school, or grant system for young directors. A talented eighteen-year-old who wants to make films can't fund himself — talent without infrastructure dies like fire without oxygen. The left tells him: here's a grant, here are mentors, try. The right tells him nothing — because the right considers cultural engineering something shameful, unworthy, "leftist." So while DEI distribution is funded by billions — conservatives donated for a candle.

They'll object: today a camera is an iPhone, distribution is YouTube, no budgets needed. For tactical tasks — yes: a blogger with a phone films a report from a Somali daycare in Minnesota — and gets millions of views overnight. But a viral clip changes the agenda for a week. A film, a series, a book — changes the lens for a generation. Roman Holiday has been watched for seventy years. The clip from Minnesota will be forgotten in a month.

A four-year horizon is not a strategy.

The result is before our eyes. Trump wins — and signs executive orders. Why orders, not laws through Congress? Because laws require broad support — and it doesn't exist. A congressman votes not by conviction but by constituency. And the constituency was formed by that same cultural machine that no one rebuilt. The next president will reverse it — and there will be nothing to resist with. The Overton window has shifted so far that a political "right-wing" victory is not a reversal but a deceleration in the same direction. If the window keeps shifting at the same pace, in a generation the question won't be "is childhood sex reassignment permissible" but "from what age is it mandatory."

Gramsci warned: "The state was merely the forward trench; behind it lay a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks" ^[4]. The White House is the forward trench. The right takes it once every eight years — and discovers that the fortresses behind it stand untouched. In Gramsci's terms, this is a war of position — and you don't win it with a single assault.

Why? Because fifty years ago the left invested in institutions that produce the next generation of voters — universities, film schools, editorial boards, foundations ^[24]. These institutions work every day, under any president. A Republican in the White House — while a professor at Berkeley shapes the worldview of twenty-year-olds. In ten years they vote — and no executive order outweighs what they've been taught since eighteen. The right invests in those who persuade already-existing voters. Shapiro explains, Peterson inspires, PragerU educates ^[12] — but that's working with those who already listen. What's needed is a director, an actor, a musician who changes those who don't listen — through story, emotion, image. That's a different profession and a different horizon.

A publicist works for this election cycle. A film director works for the next generation.

Left-enders and right-enders. The creator doesn't distinguish.

And here is the key point that both those who diagnose and those who try to treat consistently miss.

A creative person — a director, actor, composer — lives in his own world. He works on a piece as a value in itself — and follows a different strategy: my works are eternal, they'll outlive both the left-enders and the right-enders. Delving into electoral intrigues is beneath his precious time, reserved for eternity. He has his own tunnel vision — the deepest immersion in his subject that makes him a genius, but also makes him blind to everything else.

Prokofiev left Bolshevik Russia in 1918 and conquered Paris, New York, Chicago. In 1936 he voluntarily returned to Stalin's USSR — and with the same brilliance wrote Alexander Nevsky for Eisenstein: a state commission, pure propaganda, genius music ^[25]. Weill — Brecht's co-author — served the left-wing avant-garde in Berlin — and without blinking switched to commercial mainstream in New York. Rossellini made propaganda for Mussolini — and two years later directed the anti-fascist icon Rome, Open City. Von Braun built the V-2 for Hitler and the Saturn V for NASA — with equal enthusiasm ^[26]. Four geniuses, four crossed ideological borders — and not a single crisis of conscience. A creator goes where the conditions for self-realization seem best.

This applies to every screenwriter, every director, every actor. They are not soldiers of ideology. They are craftsmen and artists. Give them a commission, a budget, and freedom — and they'll make you a masterpiece. About family, about God, about whatever you want. With the same talent they now use to make masterpieces about the deconstruction of everything alive. To those still tormented by "where are today's Mozarts?" — if any such people remain, which I personally doubt — a reminder: Zimmer, Spielberg, Hopkins are still active. The question is not about Mozarts — it's about commissioners. A preacher explains the world to those who already believe. A producer shapes the world for those who haven't yet thought about it. Gramsci distinguished these roles — and bet on the second.

They'll object: creators are left by nature. No. The left spent fifty years building an environment where being left is comfortable — and got a left Hollywood. Brecht died a communist in the GDR — but kept his money in a Swiss account. Prokofiev was a star of the free world — and returned to Stalin. Why? Because in Paris, Berlin, London he was merely one of many, but old Koba the bandit managed to convince him he was one of a kind. Change the environment — change the "nature."

A contract for a dream.

The first Hollywood arose when four conditions coincided: (1) a monopoly that stopped serving demand; (2) a technological shift that broke the distribution monopoly; (3) proven solvent demand; and (4) entrepreneurs who invested not in individual films but in a system.

Edison Trust foisted ten-minute clips without names or plots on audiences — the audience wanted feature-length stories with recognizable faces. Zukor, Laemmle, Fox, Mayer, the Warner brothers didn't wait for the market to self-regulate — they fled to California, where Edison's patents didn't work, and built a parallel industry from scratch: studios, contracts, theaters, distribution. Fifteen years later Edison Trust was dead, and its vanquishers controlled ninety-five percent of the American film market ^[16].

Today three of the four conditions are already in place. The monopoly isn't serving demand — Disney writes off billions ^[15], viewers vote with the remote. Distribution is demonopolized — streaming, YouTube, social media give audience access without studio permission; the independents of the 1910s had no such luxury — they had to build theaters, while today the delivery channel is practically free. Demand is proven — Sound of Freedom ^[10] and Am I Racist? ^[11] are no longer hypotheses but box office.

The fourth condition is missing: people willing to invest not in yet another film — but in a factory. A studio, film school, festival, scholarship program, system of long-term contracts with creators. Not to make a film — to build the place where films are made. The difference is the same as buying an apartment versus building a city.

Crucially, this is not about capturing the existing machine. A hostile takeover of Hollywood is a fantasy that discredits the idea. The first Hollywood didn't seize Edison Trust — it built a parallel industry and won in open competition. The Trust didn't die from an antitrust lawsuit but because audiences flocked to those who made better films. The task is not to seize someone else's factory but to build your own. The competitors invested and got results — a fair deal. Time to make your own.

Cinema — the most important of arts. Copy without blushing.

The factory is needed. Who will work in it?

The task is clear, though far from simple: systematic recruitment of creative talent — directors, screenwriters, actors, specialists in packaging ideas. Creating content in which family and children look not archaic but attractive. And willingness to pay more than competitors do. This is the first stage, not the end goal. Buy the professionals on the market. They create content — content shifts the norm — the norm creates demand for communities, schools, institutions that reproduce talent on their own. No magic pill — just an entry point into the cycle.

How to recruit? Technologically not a new task. Communists in the mid-twentieth century solved it effectively — without moralizing, purely as engineering. Their approach should be studied, refined, and applied. This isn't theory: in the 1920s Lenin called cinema the most important of arts — and the Comintern took it as an action plan. In the 1930s it purposefully worked with Hollywood, recruiting screenwriters, directors, and producers. Dalton Trumbo, one of the highest-paid screenwriters of his era, wrote Roman Holiday and Spartacus — while being a Communist Party member. When Congress investigated in 1947, dozens like Trumbo surfaced — the "Hollywood Ten" was just the tip ^[17]. The technology worked then — it will work now.

Daily Wire ^[13], Angel Studios ^[14], PureFlix. Targeted hits proved demand — but didn't create an industry. Demand doesn't become an ecosystem on its own. Hollywood grew from market demand — but demand existed thirty years before a small group of moguls invested not in films but in a system. Today's moguls exist — they need convincing.

One side controls film schools, festivals, awards, and critics — not because they seized them but because they built them. The other side in half a century built nothing in return. Almost nothing. The sole exception — Nashville: studios, labels, a system for developing talent, its own awards, its own ecosystem. Country dominates streaming and fills stadiums — proof that a parallel industry works when built. But Nashville is music. The screen remains empty.

The problem isn't that scaling failed — the scaling task was never set. A podcaster hires a second-tier director to make a "conservative film" — and gets exactly what he deserves (Run Hide Fight, Shut In — you know the ones). Competitors don't make "progressive films." They hire the best and give them freedom. Ideology arrives on its own — through the environment, through studio culture, through talent selection. Not through the brief.

While conservatives offer screenwriters repentance — progressives pay them a salary.

They'll object: conservative content is boring by nature — order isn't dramatic, family isn't a plot. Aristotle seemingly backs them: drama is conflict, conflict is violation of order. For half a century the rebel on screen was left-wing, tradition was the set they smashed. But today progressivism is the order — corporate orthodoxy, mandatory trainings, disciplinary commissions. The Aristotelian rebel is, for the first time in fifty years, on the conservative side. They don't need to make order interesting. They need to understand they are already rebels — and the rebel on screen was always the protagonist.

Who are the judges?

The Passion of the Christ grossed $612 million ^[18] — and zero cultural influence. Not a single award, not a single place in a curriculum. Moonlight grossed $65 million ^[19] — and instantly entered the canon: Oscar, film school curricula, required lists. The difference is not in quality. The difference is in who controls the definition of quality.

Festivals, awards, criticism, curricula, "greatest ever" lists — not the decoration of the industry but its command center. The meta-level where it's decided what counts as art. A film without legitimation remains a commodity: bought but not cited, not studied. Content without recognition is propaganda — even if it's better than what's recognized.

A studio without its own critical ecosystem is a factory without a sales department. The product exists, but no one explained to the market why it's good. Nashville understood this: CMA Awards, its own criticism, its own canon — country doesn't ask Grammy for permission. A film factory needs the same: its own festivals, awards, critics, "hundred best." Not to capture others' — to build parallel ones. Like everything else in this essay.

Inheritance without a will.

The creative world is transparent — from festivals to YouTube — and cancel culture works as a free recruitment agency, delivering trained professionals with names and motivation. One grant isn't enough — you need a studio, a festival, a scholarship program, a place where a creator builds a career. Then the network effect kicks in: one director brings a cinematographer, screenwriter, actors; one producer launches a studio.

But assembling fragments into a working system is half the job. The second half is protecting it from capture. Gramsci formulated it, Dutschke named it ^[4][24], the left implemented it: the march through institutions — a technology of internal capture, refined to automatism. The first Hollywood was built by market rebels who didn't build a single safeguard into the design. Two generations later their factory was seized without paying a cent. The new one must be designed differently — with protection in the blueprint, not in prayer.

Conclusion: who buys art — buys the future.

Creators don't care whose side you're on. They don't care about your religion, your politics, or your anxieties about civilization's fate. They do their thing — and do it brilliantly. For whoever pays.

Right now the space between the conservative thinker and the audience is filled with progressive content — not because they stole it, but because conservatives left it empty. And if every generation gets the culture the previous generation paid for, then building a factory capable of turning an idea into spectacle, a value into fashion, a commandment into a hit — is not a question of aesthetics but a condition of prosperity. Not survival — a Polyergus colony doesn't destroy its pupae suppliers. Someone has to keep bearing children for them to re-educate.

To those who annually invest billions in tactics: are you willing to invest in strategy at least a comparable share? Not charity — the foundation on which tactics stop being disposable. And to those waiting for spiritual awakening — face the truth: while you argue about God, someone else's producers are making films your grandchildren will watch tonight. While you pray for the salvation of civilization — the opponents are writing the script by which it will live. Not because God turned away. But because no one invested in making your worldview packaged brighter, filmed with more talent, and promoted more aggressively than the competitors'.

"Politics is downstream from culture" — Andrew Breitbart said this fifteen years ago ^[23]. It's time to finally take it seriously.

Direction is not a route. But whoever hasn't chosen a direction has already arrived.

What remained outside the frame

1. Sociologists — from Durkheim to Alexander — long described how society moves things between the "sacred" and the "profane." The left intuitively turned this into a tool — but without blueprints. Question: can this be turned into a designable technology with predictable results?

2. Nashville proved that a parallel cultural industry works. But music scales differently than film: lower entry threshold, shorter production cycle, one hit pays for ten flops. A film factory requires different capital, different timelines, different risk tolerance. Question: what from the Nashville model transfers to the screen — and what must be invented anew?

3. Maecenas gave his name to an entire phenomenon, the Medici got the Renaissance, Koba got a world-class Soviet culture. Each found a way for the creator to make something great while the commissioner gets what he needs. But the model has never been described — each time from scratch, by feel, by intuition. Question: can this be formalized?

4. The first Hollywood was built by market rebels who didn't build a single safeguard against ideological capture. Two generations later the factory was taken from within. Corporate charters, hiring policies, ownership structure, organizational culture — where exactly should the safeguards stand so the new factory doesn't repeat the fate of the first? Question: how to design an institution resistant to capture — without sacrificing creative freedom?