Why doesn’t conservative media support conservative art?

Earlier this year, a talented Catholic filmmaker named Paul Roland released his first film. Called Exemplum , it was written, produced, directed by, and stars Roland himself. Shot in black and white, the film tells the story of a priest whose obsession with social media fame leads him into criminal activity.

The cost of making Exemplum? Only $10,000.

This is a remarkable achievement. On top of that, Exemplum is a very good movie — engrossing, well acted, and expertly edited and paced. The black and white gives it an immersive element of film noir.

Roland, who lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife and baby daughter, is a Catholic and is conservative on many issues. He would seem the kind of artist that the Right has been waiting for. After all, we complain about Hollywood all the time.

Yet his film only got a notice in Breitbart — nothing in the Daily Wire, or Blaze Media, or Fox News.

“My Catholic spirituality serves as the foundation for all my work,” Roland recently told me. Yet even the Catholic media has not reviewed his film.

This points to a serious problem on the right. When a gifted young singer or filmmaker emerges on the left, the entire media ecosystem works in tandem to lift that person up. They are noticed in Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Reporter, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. There are profiles on the morning shows, grants and financial support. Everybody pulls in one direction.

On the right, it is almost the opposite effect. “There is a lot of gatekeeping,” Roland tells me. “Everyone is protecting their own turf.” Conservative media companies want to promote their own product. Whereas on the left everyone lends a hand to uplift talent, on the right there is more of an effort to ignore it.

As I’ve spoken to Roland since his film came out, we’ve found ourselves in similar situations. Last year I published a book, The Devil’s Triangle, recounting my nightmare experience as a target during the 2018 Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. It’s not only a political work but a cultural one about life in the 1980s. It has gotten good notices on Amazon, but not many reviews in the conservative media. One that did appear was barely coherent.

Another conservative site, the Washington Free Beacon, did a lengthy interview with me — that never ran. Imagine the liberal love fest if I had caved to the Left’s bullying and witness tampering and dragged Kavanaugh down. I’d be the editor of Vanity Fair and the king of Hollywood.

When I was a young liberal writer in the 1980s, I always felt myself buoyed by a group of like-minded socialists in the media and arts scene. Yes, we criticized each other’s work (conservatives these days can have very thin skin about being criticized), but we were also a family that celebrated each other’s art. There is no such familial community on the right. It makes people like Paul Roland give up — and we desperately need talent like his.

When a book like The Devil’s Triangle is published or a film like Exemplum is released, the Right needs to be more like the Left. We have to put territory aside, as well as any personal beefs, and support the artists who can change the culture.

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture. Neither flourishes if there’s no water.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.