Pop culture is conservative now

0:00President Trump said many wild things this year, but one of the wildest was on Pod Force One. where he talked about this multi-day aptitude test he took at the age of like 11 or 12. They said, your son is brilliant at music. He'd be an incredible musician. Alas. This is not what my father wanted to hear. Right out of college, Trump tried producing Broadway shows. And he has taste. You can argue about whether it's good taste. But Trump loves music and movies and architecture, LOL. and he's been using his time in office to shape popular culture. The culture was already moving right. It was embracing the trads and the chads.

0:39And so in the waning days of 2025, we're looking at how the counterculture along the province of lefties and hippies moved swiftly and sharply right. And we're going to ask if it'll ever move back. That's coming up on Today Explained.

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1:52Today is gonna be explained. To you. My name is Max Tawney. I'm the media editor at Semaphore, and I'm the co-host of our media podcast, Mixed Signals. So we have Warner Brothers. We have Netflix. We have Paramount. Walk us through what exactly happened here. So Netflix announced that it was acquiring Warner Brothers. Netflix has inked a deal with Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix is about to buy Warner Brothers, and it's actually a huge deal for the Lord of the Rings community. Let me explain. I hate this. I don't want fewer studios. I want more studios. This goes back to earlier this summer when the Ellison family finalized its purchase of Paramount.

2:40As soon as the merger was completed, they moved and turned their attention to Warner Brothers. Warner Bros. rejected not one, but two bids from Paramount. Paramount made three bids to buy the company over the past couple of weeks. It has now made six different offers for Warner Brothers Discovery. It's been rejected each time. So they made this attempt to kind of to quickly combine with Warner Brothers with the idea that then they could be a true competitor in streaming with Netflix. Netflix, on the other hand, realized, saw that this was coming and also saw an opportunity to get its hands on one of the major Hollywood entertainment companies in the Warner Brothers Studios, which has produced some of the most iconic series and franchises and movies in the world.

3:27You know, Casablanca. Here's looking at you, kid. They have the rights to the DC cinematic universe, which is Batman. Why so serious? As well as a lot of prestige television in HBO, in The Sopranos. All this from a slice of gabagool. And White Lotus. These gays, they're trying to murder me. These great television properties. And in the end, I think a lot of people see this as the CEO of Warner Brothers, David Zasloff, preferring the bid from Netflix. And yet, Paramount being Paramount, the Ellisons being the Ellisons, had to respond. How did they respond when Netflix won? They announced that they were launching a hostile takeover attempt of Warner Brothers and that they were going to essentially appeal directly to the Warner Brothers shareholders, saying that they have a better deal.

4:17It appears that maybe the seventh time is the charm for Paramount. We literally submitted$30 a share in cash, never got a phone call, never got a response. And that's why we're here today. We're here to finish, to make sure that we can take directly to shareholders the offer that we sent to the board. So you never got a response. They have offered an all-cash bid for the entire company. So Paramount is saying, hey, we're willing to go directly to shareholders. They're also hinting that they have a better relationship with the Trump administration and federal regulators. It was revealed this week that Jared Kushner is one of the individuals who is providing some money backing Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers' discovery.

4:57Trump, crucially, when he was asked about this this week, said— I don't know. I've never spoken. We don't really know if that's true or not. There is a world in which the president of the United States is not remotely involved in business dealings such as these. However, that is not the world in which we live. Donald Trump is the president and he is involved here. How exactly? Trump is being overt about how he wants to be involved in this deal. He literally said in an interview. I'll be involved in that decision. And all of the parties who have some sort of a stake in this deal are acting that way as well and appealing to Trump.

5:35Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix, has made multiple trips to the White House, one in which he met with Trump and talked about this. The Ellisons, David and Larry Ellison, have both appealed to Trump arguing their side of this situation. Both sides are staffing up with lobbyists and people who are from Trump's orbit, thinking that they can kind of get the inside track that way. And Trump is repeatedly kind of weighing in here, saying that he is going to take a look and that he is concerned about some monopoly situations, at least in the case of Netflix. I have to see what percentage of market they have.

6:13But that, as he put it— None of them are particularly great friends of mine. You know, the narrative around the Ellisons, you know, a month ago, two months ago, was Donald Trump is friends with the Ellisons and he is going to allow them to get what they want here. Ted Sarandos and Netflix do not seem to have accepted that as fact. And so it's worth asking, Max, what what does Trump want here? Hilariously enough, that's the big question and the one that none of us really know the answer to. You're right that the Ellisons have a longstanding, good relationship with Trump, and that's something that they've made no secret of.

6:48And Trump has spoken very highly of the Ellisons and said that he really liked the way that they were stewarding Paramount. On the flip side, Trump has been reportedly has been very impressed by Ted Sarandos and seems to like him. And, you know, crucially enough, Netflix doesn't also have a news division. So there's not like this nightly or daily stream of content that's pissing off the administration and the White House. And so I think that that also plays a role here. All right. So President Trump clearly wants to be involved at 3000 feet in the business of all of this. But the president recently has also expressed some interest in being in the mix of what is getting made in Hollywood and elsewhere.

7:32Tell me about Rush Hour 4, Max.

7:38Yeah, so last month I got this amazing tip that Donald Trump had been telling people that he was lobbying the Ellisons to make another installment of the movie Rush Hour. The amount will be$50 million. $50 million? And who do you think you kidnapped, Chelsea Clinton? It was one of those tips that I was like, this is too good to be true. There's just no way. And it turned out it was exactly true. Trump had been talking to Larry Ellison, saying that he should bring back this buddy cop comedy series starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. And, you know, I kind of raised some questions for me, like, is Trump a huge fan of this series?

8:24Is he, like, watching the reruns of this on TNT or something? But actually, it turned out, as many things do with Trump, to have a lot to do with his own personal relationships. The longtime kind of overseer, creator, director of the Rush Hour series, Brett Ratner, also has a personal connection to Trump. He is the director of this upcoming Amazon documentary about Melania Trump. You know, I have heard that he's spent more time hanging around Mar-a-Lago and has a friendly relationship with the president. One imagines that that played a certain role here. Brett Ratner kind of got drummed out of Hollywood because he was credibly accused of sexual misconduct.

9:06And this is one of those things that for the Trump administration feels like a bit of a hobby horse. You find someone who's been accused of, you know, Me Too or racism or whatever, and you're like, the woke warriors went wild. This never should have happened. Do you see the attempted rehabilitation of Mr. Ratner as like part of a whole when we talk about the Trump administration's approach to culture? I think that certainly Trump has no scruples and many of the people in his circles have very few scruples about bringing back or working with people who've been credibly accused of serious misconduct.

9:45And they found that often some of these folks have common enemies in the kind of censorious media, as they kind of put it. I think also in a certain way, they feel that some of these figures can be kind of like acquired on the cheap, essentially. And you see this in a lot of cases with people who Trump gets close to. Mel Gibson, who has not been accused of those things as far as I know. You guys maybe should check that. the comedian Russell Brand and others, certainly. What do we know about what kind of culture President Trump really likes? Donald Trump's taste in culture and entertainment really is all over the place with a few uniting themes, I would say.

10:36Trump loves classic action, macho kind of content. You see this with The people who are on his Hollywood council, Sylvester Stallone. Hi, my name is Rocky Balboa, the Italian style. John Voight. Do not tell me it can't be done. Mel Gibson. They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom! He's definitely proven that he is interested in this kind of testosterone-fueled version of the world. Now, that doesn't keep him from blasting cats.

11:21And the Phantom of the Opera.

11:27At campaign events and at the White House. But he's a classic fan of both Broadway and macho movies and movie stars from the 80s and 90s. You wrote that Trump's return to power marked the triumph of a cultural red lash that has been brewing for years. What did you mean? I think a lot of people close to Trump and a lot of people who supported him believed that 2024 and his reelection was a vindication of their worldview. And they saw this in the strength of the growth of independent podcasters and the kind of manosphere figures like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn and their willingness to openly support Trump and kind of chop it up.

12:16So you're way up with cocaine more than anything else you can think of. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie. You know what I'm saying? I always got more publicity than other people. And I didn't – it wasn't like I was trying. In fact, I don't know exactly why. Maybe you can tell me why. Oh, I can definitely tell you. You said a lot of wild shit. They saw this as a vindication that this was really the mainstream culture and that, you know, kind of this anti-Trump culture, cultural backlash that had kind of emanated from the traditional gatekeepers in Hollywood and these other places just had lost some currency with a lot of mainstream Americans.

12:55You know, they pointed at the popularity of country music. You know, there's been these big debates over whether people like Morgan Wallen, you know, is he kind of a Trump supporter? You know, I think that a lot of people who like Trump and are very pleased by this have pointed at all of those signs and the popularity of country music, bro podcasters and Trump's reelection and said, this is mainstream American culture.

13:22That was Semaphore's Max Tani. Coming up, everyone's a critic. JK, JK, JK. But our next guest is, and he's going to explain how culture moved so far to the right.

13:56Today Explained W. David Marks, no relation, is a cultural critic and author of the new book, Blank Space, A Cultural History of the 21st Century. So David writes that in the waning years of the 20th century, pop culture got very stale, that dominant culture was liberal, it was centrist, it was Clintonian. And so a counterculture emerged, embodied by Vice magazine. And Vice magazine in the 21st century in New York City was primarily a hedonistic and nihilistic kind of downtown subcultural product. But Gavin McInnes, one of the founders, started inserting very quietly these right-wing transgressive ideas into it.

14:41But what I enjoy most is infiltrating different subcultures to figure out what really makes them tick. And that started with boldly using racial slurs in which he became very controversial. I don't think there's anyone who knows Gavin in any way that hasn't heard him drop the N-bomb. Oh, constantly. He loves it. Yeah. But then also doing a essay for the American conservative in which he said he was going to convert hipsters to conservatism. Finally, the dumb community's days are numbered. Young liberals are slowly but surely being replaced with a new breed of kid that isn't afraid to embrace conservatism.

15:15I don't think necessarily that everything starts from there, but it begins the idea that in the 21st century, if you want to be transgressive, which is a big part of cool, that the right wing supplies more fuel for that. And so then you get to 4chan and these internet, anonymous internet sites where people are trying to be as transgressive as possible and where they end up is being often quite bigoted and anti-liberal. And as that kind of snowballs into the broader culture, there's the sense with the ascendancy of woke to break the chains of this liberal oppression that we have to be very conservative.

15:53And so white men in particular have kind of re-embraced this transgressiveness as their call to power. What leads me to look at something like vice at that time and think, oh, that's so cool. I'm having a response to what came before. What was it? So I think especially in the Bush years with the Iraq war and the Iraq war being increasingly a disaster, you have things like Green Day's American Idiot. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11. Of course, not a single member of Congress wanted to sacrifice their child for the war in Iraq. Hail to the Thief, the Radiohead album.

16:37So this kind of anti-Bush sentiment powers a lot of the pop culture that is happening. Obama really comes out of that groundswell of looking for somebody who can be a new form of resistance against conservatives. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. And yet the culture that follows from those years, I think, is more marked by what you would call kind of poptimist music and culture, which is a real kind of embrace of earnestness and straightforward pop and melodies. And so you have things like Katy Perry's California Girls. You have the rise of Taylor Swift. And you have shows like Glee.

17:2625 % show tunes, 25 % hip-hop, 25 % classic rock. 100 % gay. Ideas of liberal inclusivity did float to the top. HBO Girls is kind of like a hybrid of that vice aesthetic and the earnestness. I am 13 pounds overweight and it has been awful for me my whole life! The kind of anti-liberal side of the right wing was getting more and more alienated from what they're seeing on TV or the music they're listening to, which is it did not reflect their particular values. And so, so much of the backlash against the Obama years was not just even a political one, it was a cultural one of a giant swath of the United States feeling like they were being left out of the culture and that they really wanted someone to come back into power and give them a little bit more symbolic glory.

18:15And it's easy to see Trump in those kind of cultural terms. so in in many ways this swing to the right is inevitable there's just a natural pendulum swing if you have transgressiveness be the central value of popular culture and the coolness is the supreme virtue of consumer culture then if you have a sense that liberals have the power and that power can be political power it could be economic power it could be cultural power then transgressiveness obviously can be re-empowered and reinvigorated on the right because they're fighting against that system. I remember hearing someone talk about Charlie Kirk after he was assassinated.

18:59And they characterized it as he would go to a college campus and say, you are allowed to have sex out of wedlock. You are allowed to drink. You are allowed to do drugs. You are allowed to do everything that the kids in the 60s and 70s marched in the streets so that they could do. This was cool, but it's not anymore because you don't have to fight. You don't have to fight the authorities to have sex with your boyfriend or girlfriend. You don't have to fight the authorities to smoke weed. The true rebellious thing is to get married. The truly rebellious thing is to go to church. The truly rebellious thing is to not smoke weed.

19:41Help me understand the relationship between a guy like Charlie Kirk understanding kids today don't need to rebel to smoke weed. They actually need to rebel and tell their parents, like, guys, we're going to go to church. And where this country is politically. Culture is about conventional decision making. And so there's a part of everything we do where we're asking, you know, what is the group that we're in and what is the beliefs that we have? You know, we imitate the people in our group. At the same time, what that breeds is something called counter imitation, which is that a group that says we're not that group just does the opposite practice to show that they're different.

20:21And so I think so much of conservative politics, all it is is counter imitation. Now we're at a point where premarital sex and drugs are not taboo anymore. And so if you want to show that you're not part of that group, you do the opposite of that. And so the idea that it is to be cool and rebellious by going to church is just a very simple counter imitation of the counter imitation.

20:47So at the end of the day, the pendulum is going to keep swinging, right? President Trump may be in the Oval Office demanding to have rush hour for and doing whatever he's doing at the Kennedy Center. But I wonder if already we're 12 months into his second term. I wonder if already you see the pendulum starting to swing back in the other direction. Or do you think a kind of conservative culture will hold on for a while longer, be cool and transgressive for a while longer? I do think the fashion trend, and it really feels like a fashion of being anti-liberal, has some legs in the sense that if you compare the Women's March and the No Kings rallies, No Kings, the general aesthetic sense of that rally is that it is boomers, it's people's parents.

21:37It's very normie. So we now move on to the Antiqua portion of our coverage of the No Kings rally. These inflatable suits everywhere you go. People are partying. Where'd you get that suit? I bought it! Amazon, but you know, I don't really... It doesn't really have this kind of pop culture edge to it. And then you go back to the Women's March. Massive crowd of women marching behind me. This is the front line, and they're pretty amped. Donald Trump has got to go! Obviously, there's the use of Beyoncé's formation. It's kind of a major pop culture moment there. There's the pussy hat. And then you have things like Black Lives Matter, protest, and Kendrick Lamar's All Right being associated with that.

22:19We gon' be all right! We gon' be all right! We gon' be all right! We gon' be all right! So there was more of a linkage between pop culture and the resistance in 2016. And I think we're not quite there in terms of pop culture going back to full resistance mode. That's still in people's memory quite fresh. And there is something cringe about it in that it feels like an old stale fashion trend. And so really until that gets forgotten or there's a new kind of resistance that does feel properly transgressive, I think it'd be hard for this political wave against Trump to be fully enmeshed in a pop cultural moment.

23:01W. David Marks. His book is Blank Space, a cultural history of the 21st century. Peter Balanon-Rosen produced today's show, Jolie Myers edited. Laura Bullard checked the facts. Patrick Boyd and David Tattashore engineered. Many thanks to Vox's Constance Grady, Kendall Cunningham, and Christian Paz. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.

23:38Thank you.