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The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.
While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.
I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?
This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.
I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.
Agree + emphasizing the last line: "...prove to be dangerous down the line." This has always been my contention with Wokeness going back to, at least, the emergence of Jordan Peterson. The left seems to be creating it's opposition through its actions and it's extremely dangerous if you're a person who actually cares about progressive and liberal values. The reaction will be reactionary and that's bad.
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I would not start celebrating just yet. War makes a distinction between tactics and strategy. The Republicans have good tactics. Everything from Loudon County, "we're coming for your children", trans sports and now ""MAP""-sympathetic liberals are tactical wins. But strategic wins are nowhere to seen. Hell, it's not clear there even is a strategy.
Supreme court capture was a fortunate strategic win for Republicans. But from a strategic POV, I can't think of anything else that's gone in their favor since 2010-ish. If anything, they've further alienated every institution while refusing to enfranchise new institutions that are favorable or ambivalent towards them.
Every time a tactical win hints towards a long term strategic strategy, the Republicans have shown themselves to be incompetent in pursuing it. Republicans continue to live in the 20th century, as a party of the White-Christians. Now the party of Rural-White-AntiElite-Christians.
Some Hispanics, Asians & Free-Speech-Atheists have landed on their laps, but there have been no real efforts to court them. Each of the conservative arms seem to be fighting on their isolated fronts, with zero communication or attempt at unifying these tactical fights along a single strategic meta-objective. The Tates don't get along with the Petersons. The Rinos don't get along with the Tea Party. The Race Blind don't get along with the White-race essentialists. Yeah, differences exist in all big tents. But, this "Enemy of my enemy" tactical alliance leads to "crabs in a bucket" style strategic failure.
Liberals on the other hand have continued their decades long progress down unified aims of 'destigmatization, equity, removal of individual responsibility and handing over governance to faceless beaurocrats'. It isn't a slippery slope as much as heavy steam roller with immovable momentum in a single direction.
Ironically, Tucker Carlson (despite being exiled from Fox) appears to be the only one who is able to interact with all faces of the American right. In that sense, he does come across as the Republican Jon Stewart. Both of them clearly peddle propaganda, but know how to appear as if they are good faith actors. The know how to keep the public on their side while still getting audience with their party elite. In the long term, Conservatives need to prioritize recovery/reinvention of their institutions. I will start trusting a revival of conservatism when they can reclaim institutions of Prestige.
Towards that goal, I'd look at the success of Israeli and Indian conservatives in institution capture over the decades. Neither have been perfect, and face a ton of criticism in how slow they've been. But, there's stuff to learn. I can speak more for Modi, other's can opine in on the specifics of other successfully executed long term conservative strategies.
First, pick your battles.
Passion of the Christ is not coming back, and no future generation is going to be above 50% white. Gays-Lesbians-and-Bisexuals as a people are here to stay, and blanket bans on abortion will continue to be unpopular.
But that doesn't mean you can't get your wins from elsewhere.
RRR and Kantara were able to successfully outshine Bollywood ( a left liberal stronghold) by heavily inculcating Hindu/Indic themes without calling it as such. The directors of these movies aren't random conservatives. They are just great artists, who happen to draw heavily from Indian myth. Now, South India has developed its entire self-sustaining industry that doesn't depend on kowtowing to Bollywood in order to build an entertainment career. There is a US TV show called Manifest which does something similar. It has a clear Christian undercurrent, but stays vague enough to appeal to large audiences. You can win christian-ish, anti-abortion-ish or even anti-immigration-ish battles..... but you need to pick ones that don't look like dogwhistles. They also need to be a compelling narrative that works in their own right, besides the undercurrents.
Second, pick your alliances.
Modi has stopped trying to win over liberal-arts students at top liberal arts universities. But his strong-man numbers first image appeals more directly to India's vast STEM population. College educated STEM grads are neither religious nor conservative. But, he knows he can make more sense to them than any other group. STEM grads understand the the optimism around boring-but-at-scale policy. STEM grads care about education. So he appeals to NRIs (mostly engineers), obtains favorable foreign Visa deals, talks about hard-infrastructure (toilets, roads) and maintains the support from this group. They might disagree with his religious leanings, but he never talks about those leanings when addressing this group. Of all the institutions that are adversarial towards Modi, STEM universities are the least hostile, and that is an acceptable deal for him.
The Republicans must enfranchise a young group group on the rise. And that means making deals with institutions are 'least-hostile' towards them. Joe Rogan, Tate and Peterson are the obvious faces that appeal to college going future-corporate-leader types. Remember, these people 1 degree of separation from true institutional powers like Huberman and Attia, who call Stanford home. BYU, GMU and similar departments have groups who have agreement with the conservative movement. Contrarian leftists and Enlightened centrists can easily be brought into the fold without needing them to scream allegiances. But maintaining constant interaction with these folks is important. Hell, DARPA funded labs and affirmative-action-agnostic universities like Caltech/MIT also have avenues Republicans could exploit. non-coastal STEM focused public universities like UMich, UWisc, GATech, Purdue also have some possible avenues for alliance.
I could go on, but prestige education, prestige news (in any medium of their choice) and prestige entertainment are essential institutional pillars for any successful movement. As long as conservatives fail at establishing long term strategic progress towards these 3 pillars, all the tactical wins are meaningless.
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It may be related to a mindset common in the American right, the type of siege mentality that is the justification for a lot of right wing politics. American right wingers tend to want to live on a farm with many guns and shoot at the imposing threats. The pedos are coming for the kids, the taxman is coming for your money, the green people are coming for your car, the FDA is coming to forcibly vaccinated etc. The left does see itself as oppressed but sees more structural oppression rather than conspiratorial oppression and has less of a siege mentality.
The journalists may be picking up on the siege mentality perspective of the film and therefore coding it as right wing.
The Right Wing mentality of the film is the Cowboy-Run-and-Gun attitude of the protags and their org. That if we just gave enough good guys enough guns and enough free rein, they could kill off all the bad guys and rescue all the kids. The failure to do so is a failure of determination, of willpower, of courage. ((I suppose for some absurd value of enough they would be right: if we devoted the entire resources and budget of the US Marine corps to tracking down traffickers it would make it harder))
The left wing liberal mentality is that
Always the left wing liberal solution is something-something structural causes, combined with government surveillance and intrusion into family and private relationships.
Left wing liberals argue that claiming you're anti-pedo so you spend your time running around with guns "tracking down traffickers" is like claiming you're anti-hunger so you spend your time ordering sandwiches from Quiznos for random people: somewhere between wildly ineffective altruism and actively distracting from the reality. It might make some former DHS agents feel like big men, but it doesn't do much to help kids.
ETA: The near perfect inverse parallel is the BLM argument made by many conservatives that Floyd-Style police killings, while unfortunate, are a drop in the bucket compared to Black-on-Black crime. So saying BLM and opposing police is going to cost Black Lives.
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Yes, but it still can be criticized, because sometimes "my ideological enemies are building a weapon" amounts to "my ideological enemies get to fight fairly". Or to put it another way, the left is so used to privilege that equality looks like repression.
Movies and TV that are deliberately promoting some progressive bugaboo in an unfair way are too common for me to care that somehow, some conservative managed to do the same thing once.
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