How Conservatism Can Save the L.A. Weekly

Everything is going to hell at the nation’s largest alt-weekly. In October — in an act of half-baked hubris — a group of conservatives bought the L.A. Weekly, praying that nobody would notice they were conservative. They gift-wrapped their identities inside an LLC, Semanal Media; then, from afar, they sacked nine out of 13 of the paper’s radically left staff. But while the Left, as a modus operandi, casually de-platforms conservatives whenever and wherever they might emerge, it depicts the cuts at the L.A. Weekly as an act of terror.

“The L.A. Weekly as we know it is dead,” said one writer. The editor in chief compared it to the massacre in Game of Thrones: “We weren’t expecting the ‘Red Wedding.’ That’s how deep the cuts are.” For the past six months, Brian Calle — the gay, pro-weed conservative publisher of the new L.A. Weekly — has been hunted down by the self-dramatizing Robespierres of the #BoycottLAWeekly insurgency. (Those he fired now lead the way.) These revolutionaries have framed Calle as a union-busting Randian supervillain. The one-sided media coverage has fed the paranoia, which includes the conspiracy theory that Calle is a surrogate in Trump’s war against the media. Charlie May at Slate wrote a story headlined “LA Weekly’s new owners quit paying writers, push outlet to the right.” This is acidulous click-bait, and one hell of a dog whistle for liberals.

The mishandling of the regime change at the L.A. Weekly has been a farce, an extended tragicomic episode. The result: Calle’s ad hoc staff is producing a shoddy liberal newspaper that liberals don’t trust to be liberal enough, which has made advertisers lose faith. UCLA pulled its ads earlier this month, according to Calle, who blamed bigotry toward conservatives. L.A.’s biggest record store, Amoeba Music, also relinquished its support.

Rather than blitzkrieging through the liberals and promoting the paper to conservative business owners in L.A., Calle has been engaging in a bizarre PR campaign to convince Los Angelenos that he’s more liberal than they think. Playing the part of a “legitimate businessman,” he is pivoting around his actual identity like Tony Soprano at a PTA meeting. “I lean to the right — a little bit — but on social issues I’ve been progressive,” Calle told L.A. Taco earlier this month. He has taken to describing himself in vague terms such as “free-market enthusiast” and says that “baggage on cultural issues” has left him uncomfortable with the label “conservative.” He seems embarrassed talking about his short tenure as vice president of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. It seems he’s either becoming a liberal or attempting to rewrite his past in real time. This amounts to a soft form of self-censorship, as the liberal jackboots proceed to stomp on his face, à la Orwell’s 1984.

A few weeks ago, I questioned Calle on his reticence: “You’re downplaying your conservatism,” I said.

“Maybe I do downplay it,” he replied, insisting that his politics don’t matter, that he has no intention of pushing the L.A. Weekly to the right, that he’s doing what’s best for the city.

This is exactly the opposite of what he should be doing. Prudent conservatism can save the L.A. Weekly. To hell with what the people want, give them what they need! It would act like a common-sense filter for unhinged intersectionality, providing checks and balances in the form of a conservative who could untangle the Weekly’s voice from the noose of stifling liberal conformity.

(Disclaimer: Between 2013 and 2017, I wrote for the L.A. Weekly, where I won an L.A. Press Club Award. In the months following Trump’s election, the L.A. Weekly as I knew it changed. It became CNN for hipsters.)

The day after Trump was elected, the music editor of the Weekly became a pamphleteer for California’s “resistance” movement. He wrote an actual guide on how to resist Trump: “California Can Lead by Example in Fighting Back against a Trump Presidency.”

A few months earlier, the Weekly had endorsed both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders with parodical identity-based arguments:

“Why, as a Young Mother, I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton.”

“Why, as a Latino Progressive, I’m Voting for Bernie Sanders.”

Conveniently left out of the conversation were two of L.A.’s most underserved minorities: Koreans and Armenians (traditionally Christian and culturally conservative, by the way). L.A. has the largest Korean population in the country. To strike ideological parity, all that was missing was “Why, as a Korean, I’m Voting for Gary Johnson.”

The current music editor, rather than keeping the music section apolitical, as it should be, recently published a “business as usual” argument, an op-ed titled “The Song Remains the Same,” in which he virtue-signals to the point of satire: “There are no shadowy crypto-fascists here. No Republicans trying to brainwash you with propaganda.”

Instead of being a strong conservative, Calle seems to be turning into a reluctant liberal. He doesn’t have to be. History is on Brian Calle’s side!

While I was never de-platformed by my editors at the Weekly, as a conservative-libertarian, I did feel a bit like Bill Buckley at Yale, or a Catholic in Cromwell’s England. After all, in 2015, I had written the Weekly’s only pro-gentrification argument, assigned by a conservative editor who insisted on having both a pro and anti-gentrification viewpoint (the latter provided by a liberal). But that was then. The social-justice-driven L.A. Weekly in the beginning of the Trump era never challenged its audience like that. It made overly sensitive liberals feel comfortable by pandering to them and providing a safe space. This might be therapeutic, but what is so “alternative” about that?

Calle, formerly the editor of the Orange County Register’s conservative opinion page, essentially had in his hands the key to L.A.’s Overton window. He could have expanded the range of acceptable discourse to include conservative ideas. He’s done no such thing. In an act of self-preservation, he is now overcompensating for his previously expressed right-wing views. He’s gay, pro-weed, and half-Latino, he reminds the media. Instead of being a strong conservative (which I believe he is, deep down), he seems to be turning into a reluctant liberal. He doesn’t have to be. History is on Brian Calle’s side!

The Weekly boycotters have ignored the fact that previous editors such as Sarah Fenske (who has written about the pope and Sarah Palin) and Jill Stewart were fair-minded conservatives: Together, they oversaw the Weekly’s liberal staff, prior to the regime Calle purged, and produced one hell of a paper. A “rational madman,” a Burkean conservative at the editorial helm of the Weekly, could save it from running headlong toward the guillotine. A conservative interbreeding with liberal sacred cows could rejuvenate the Weekly and restore a more free-range and organic product.

A conservative revolution might at least restore the paper’s political freedom so that it could, for God’s sake, go back to disrespecting rather than coddling the cultural elite.

“No one who buys bread knows whether the wheat from which it is made was grown by a Communist or a Republican,” wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. If the bread doesn’t have green mold on it, you won’t ask who made it. But if the news smells suspicious, we care about how it’s reported. A conservative running the L.A. Weekly is only rotten if he runs it as would a liberal — who views the other side as idiots beneath contempt rather than as respected rivals.

Although it has 40 years of “progressive tradition” behind it, the L.A. Weekly has been far more ideologically flexible than has been reported. It’s been shuffled between many owners and editorial identities, yo-yoing between a national and a hyper-local focus, with editors from cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Phoenix. The last owner was Denver-based company called “Voice Media Group,” hardly a cathedral of liberalism. That company sold the L.A. Weekly to Calle like cheap real estate — it had shrunk from a 200-page digest of life in the city into 50 pages of normative-liberal culture writing, with a circulation of 60,000 in a polity of 4 million. In other words, the L.A. Weekly has been a failed state under liberalism. A conservative revolution might at least restore its political freedom so that it could, for God’s sake, go back to disrespecting rather than coddling the cultural elite.

But of this writing, things are only getting worse. The Weekly’s ideological complexion now consists of an opinion-less facsimile of the real thing, preaching orthodoxy we know it doesn’t believe in — a newspaper for spineless Democrats. You almost wish the liberals were back in power.