A culture change in the red tribe world!

MONDAY, MARCH 18, 2024

The New York Times gets it right: We were struck by a front-page report in this morning's New York Times.

The report discusses a culture shift we've been struck by at the Fox News Channel. The headlines on the Times report say this:

Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here
In the Trump era, a surprising number of evangelicals are rejecting modesty and turning toward the risqué.

Has "family values" red tribe culture taken a major turn? After offering a few examples, Ruth Graham, a writer on religion, offers this thumbnail account:

GRAHAM (3/18/24): As a core faction in the Republican coalition, conservative evangelicals have long influenced the party’s policy priorities, including opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. And the influence extended to conservative culture, where evangelical norms against vulgarity were rarely challenged in public.

In some ways, they remain intact. Most pastors don’t cuss from the pulpit, or at all. Mainstream conservative churches still teach their young people to save sex for marriage and avoid pornography.

Yet a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.

For decades, "family values" conservative culture stressed evangelical norms against vulgarity. As of now, that culture is being replaced in some conservative circles by "a raunchy, boobs-and-booze ethos," Graham reports.

As we've noted in recent months, one such conservative circle is the Fox News Channel, where primetime hosts Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld are best described as "a little bit nutty and substantially smutty." 

For the record, the "raunch" this pair of mossbacks provide is typically laced with throwback, misogyny-adjacent behavior.

We'll offer examples as the week proceeds, but we were struck by Graham's report due to our own observations. We've been amazed by the degree to which Fox has moved in the direction of the "raunch" and the misogyny which are now prevalent in much of its primetime culture.

Just within the past week, Spring Break "coverage" has been widespread on Fox, with a heavy emphasis on teen-aged women in bathing suits. Watters is skilled at finding ways to report—in smarmy and condescending ways—on young women who are no longer in their suits.

At least two of his subjects in recent weeks have plainly been mentally ill. There seems to be nowhere this haunted fellow won't go, with help from his hidden producers. 

To our eye, these fellows strongly exhibit smarmy, throwback gender values. By the way, was 47-year-old comedian and primetime weekend host Jimmy Failla totally sh*tfaced as he cavorted with those college coeds in that Spring Break footage this past Saturday night?

Graham says this change is happening within evangelical culture. We've been surprised to see its dominance all through the world of Fox News.

Within the past month, we've criticized the upper-end press for averting its gaze from this behavior at Fox. This morning, bowing to our will, the Times has started to describe what's happening out there in the real world.