Matt Walsh@MattWalshBlog
One of the big reasons for the current lack of patriotism and pride in our nation’s history is that about 40 years ago our most prominent storytellers in Hollywood just basically stopped telling stories about American history altogether, unless it has something to do with WW2, civil rights, or slavery. I mean they just released a movie about the meteorologist who did the weather report for D-Day. They’ll give WW2 weathermen their own movies before they tell a story from any other era of American history.
The Right has attempted to counteract this a little bit, but “conservative” attempts at American history films and TV shows are invariably hokey and kid friendly, the kind of thing you can watch with your grandmother and your 5 year old, and you’ll all be equally informed and bored by the experience.
We need R-rated adult-oriented American history stories. Daniel Boone should have his own series. It would be gritty and violent and not for children, but it would also be phenomenally entertaining and put an American legend back on the cultural map, so to speak. The fact that Daniel Boone hasn’t been depicted on screen at all since like the 60s is a travesty. Throw a dart at that guy’s Wikipedia page and you’ll land on something that could be its own feature length trilogy.
That’s just one example. How is there not a great R-rated movie or series about Antietam? Or Kit Carson? Or the Panama Canal? How does Theodore Roosevelt not have like 10 movies about different periods of his life?
You could go much farther back to pre-American history. A movie about Cortes’s conquest of Tenochtitlan would be tremendous and horrifying and fascinating, and it would introduce into the public consciousness one of the world’s most incredible stories that most Americans know next to nothing about. And on and on.
The possibilities are literally endless. All of these movies, if they’re executed to even a B+ level, could make hundreds of millions of dollars and transform the culture in a way that a million podcast monologues never could. If the Right actually wants to reclaim the culture, this is the place to start.