Pick any week this summer, and you’d likely find a headline about a new front in America’s long-running partisan culture wars – perhaps “surprising” or suspect or both, and usually framed by rightwing pundits as a victory.
Maybe it was the backlash to an Anheuser-Busch marketing campaign featuring the transgender TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney that bumped Bud Light from the top of the beer market. Or the country singer Jason Aldean’s Try That In A Small Town, a song threatening violence to anti-police protesters; its streams increased 999% after backlash to its music video, which featured footage of Black Lives Matter protests and was filmed at a Tennessee courthouse where a Black man was lynched in 1927. Or the box office success of Sound of Freedom, an independent Christian film about child trafficking tied to QAnon, or the overnight appearance of Oliver Anthony’s welfare-denigrating song Rich Men North of Richmond on the Billboard Hot 100.
In part, it’s a familiar story: a smattering of songs, shows and films turned into culture war symbols, illuminating the amorphous, yet stark cultural divide in the US. “This is happening with everything,” said Lilliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. “It’s always evolving. New things become the thing of the day, and so one thing replaces another. It’s the same outrage, it’s just a different target.”
Still, it’s tempting to frame summer 2023 as a victory for conservative culture – the year’s most successful independent film, a major country music video hit, and the first-ever artist to top the Hot 100 without a prior chart appearance have all been claimed by the right, whether fairly (Try That In a Small Town threatens violence to anti-police protesters) or not (Anthony has publicly distanced himself from either party). But these wins are less indicative of organic popularity than of a new front for the rightwing grievance machine, which increasingly uses purchasing power – boycotting, promotion, viral metrics – to make a point.
There are sharp differences in cultural consumption between political identities, which have expanded in the age of streaming and folded into increased political polarization. “The entertainment and media consumption habits of people are highly indicative on where they stand on certain hot-button political issues in this country,” said Johanna Blakley, the director of research at USC’s Norman Lear Center, which oversees an ongoing study tracking the political divide through Americans’ TV preferences.
Over a decade of research on viewership habits has indicated that those who identify as conservative are generally distrustful of mainstream media. There are popular exceptions which have become freighted with political identity, such as Yellowstone, the show about a property- and power-obsessed Montana family that’s popular in smaller TV markets, or the chart dominance of the country singer Morgan Wallen even after he was caught using the N-word in a 2021 video. But by and large, true conservative viewers feel alienated from the mainstream. “They see liberal ideology as deeply embedded in mainstream media,” said Blakley.
A sense of resentment partially fuels consumerist campaigns to notch conservative cultural victories (often led by attention-seeking rightwing figures, such as the people who tried to claim Top Gun: Maverick as an anti-woke, masculine triumph). Take the case of Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town, which debuted on country radio in May to relatively little fanfare. It was a modestly successful song by an artist who peaked in the early 2010s, with lyrics pandering to an idea of anti-protester rural pride and seemingly coded allusions to “sundown towns” that terrorized Black people with violence after sunset (“cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, you think you’re tough / Well, try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road”).
But it wasn’t until Country Music Television removed the video in July, after criticism of its use of Black Lives Matter protest footage, that attention surged. “The location of the video [the site of a lynching], the imagery that is used, it’s all explicitly there, to evoke an anti-urban, anti-Black Lives Matter, to really pull out this urban rural divide,” said Jada Watson, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on country music. Suddenly, the song and video became a cudgel in the anti-cancel culture crusade, and it worked; the YouTube video has been viewed over 33m times. (Aldean has maintained that the song is not anti-Black Lives Matter; the video was quietly edited sometime amid the furor to remove some BLM references.)
Anthony’s success is even more notable, as he was previously unheard of – an unsigned artist living “off the grid” in rural Virginia with a few songs posted to YouTube and no prior following. There’s an audience for Anthony’s acoustic, rough-hewn style, which connects to a tradition of outsider folk with inchoate working-class politics (“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day, / vertime hours for bullshit pay”). But it has been championed primarily by rightwing figures as a new anthem of conservative values for anti-welfare stereotypes (“the obese milkin’ welfare”) rather than by listeners of country music, a genre much more complex than its white conservative reputation and riven by its own culture wars.
“There are just as many country fans that don’t appreciate those narratives as there are that do, and what drives a song within a genre like country music to the top of the all-genre chart within a week is a calculated digital movement,” said Watson. “To go to number one within a week of release on a song that was released on YouTube … that needed a big movement behind it. That’s not an organic thing.”
Notably, both songs touch on conspiracy theories – Anthony vaguely nods to many conspiracy theories around Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to politicians (“I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere”), Aldean to a longstanding conspiracy theory that the federal government will round up citizens – which have defined the summer’s other major conservative pop culture moment, Sound of Freedom.
Directed by Alejandro Monteverde, Sound of Freedom takes conspiratorial thinking a step further; it tells the story of a rogue homeland security agent, played by Jim Caviezel, who risks everything to bust a child trafficking ring in Colombia. Though Monteverde has insisted that the film, made before the emergence of QAnon, is a non-partisan humanitarian story, it has become associated with the fringe belief system, partly for its overstatement of a child-trafficking cabal, partly because of Caviezel and the film’s subject, Tim Ballard, dabbling in Q conspiracy theories, and partly because of a rightwing outsider narrative. (Donald Trump hosted a screening at his New Jersey golf course.)
“You feel like you’re sticking it to Hollywood, and you’re sticking it to the liberal media when you buy your ticket,” said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory expert and author of the forthcoming book Jewish Space Lasers, of the anti-cancel culture response. “Sound of Freedom is very much the ‘we’re finally taking over Hollywood with our values’ kind of thing.”
Rothschild sees the film, which has made over $180m domestically on a $14.5m budget, as a “mainstreaming of the ideas that QAnon is built around”. According to Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science and conspiracy theory expert at the University of Miami, its success is less tied to QAnon, which polls at around 5%, than to the mainstreaming of longstanding, more widely believed child sex trafficking conspiracy theories. “Obviously the premise is similar, but that doesn’t mean that it is QAnon,” he said. Vague conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking are “out there in the ether. To blame it on QAnon is to miss the forest for the trees.”
Fittingly, the grassroots, pay-it-forward marketing campaign of Sound of Freedom has led to even more conspiracy theories, including the belief that AMC theaters were purposefully disrupting screenings. (The chain’s CEO said of the subsequent boycott: “Sadly, conspiracy theorists are so prevalent in America. So much garbage information is spread.”)
Garbage information defines a good portion of this conservative backlash summer – some of the flashpoints intentional, some unwitting, some manufactured, some coincidental. Either way, it’s been subsumed by a loud rightwing outrage machine, one that seems poised to grind on for summers to come.
