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With the release and scathing reviews of Run Hide Fight: Infidels and the expanding slate of productions from Angel Studios, explicitly conservative entertainment is once again in the air. As with previous attempts at “right-wing” entertainment media, these releases are not finding tremendous commercial or critical success.

Some attribute these failures to the fact that they are conservative, but that is far too simplistic an answer, in my opinion. The Passion of the Christ, which presented the biblical story in a decidedly conservative (some would argue antisemitic) manner as a two-hour subtitled film, took in over half a billion dollars at the box office: hardly a failure. Outspoken and larger-than-life writer and filmmaker John Milius, he of the original Red Dawn, has never shied away from his conservative beliefs, and his notions of honor, masculinity, and living by a code infuse his writings. While Milius never found the outsized success of some of his friends, such as Lucas and Spielberg, he remained an active and vital filmmaker until he was sidelined by health issues.

No, productions like Run Hide Fight: Infidels, its predecessor, Run Hide Fight, or the ill-fated The 1/2 Hour News Hour, a poor attempt to replicate the success of The Daily Show, fail because they prioritize their political hits over any sense of what is actually entertaining.

Some may think that this is an unfair judgment because, after all, The Daily Show is unabashedly liberal, its targets are overwhelmingly conservative, and in the era of MAGA and the Trump personality cult this has only intensified. That judgment is almost correct. The Daily Show is deeply colored by the liberal worldview of its writers and performers just as Red Dawn was deeply influenced by the worldview of its creator. A piece of creative art is stamped, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly, by the worldview of its creator. When they sit down to pen something that is funny, thrilling, or just interesting to them, it will reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the manner in which they see and interpret the world. When the writers of The Daily Show look upon the absurdity of the world, they are by nature predisposed to satirize and ridicule the right, but that is a predisposition and not a commandment from on high.

In 2009, during the first few months of Obama’s first term and nearly eight years after the horrific attacks of 9/11, a low-flying jumbo jet provoked low-grade panic in New York City. The Daily Show performed a bit wondering what sort of brain-damaged nut would do such a thing to the traumatized city, and then revealed, through a doctored image, Vice President Joe Biden at the controls of the aircraft. At the time, the defining image of Biden was one of a person who tended to say and do things that caused the administration public-relations troubles, and so the skit exaggerated this for comedic effect, even though the vice president was on “their side.” The 1/2 Hour News Hour never ever skewered anyone on the right, because its mandate was to deliver conservative talking points. It was never comedy produced by a conservative mind, such as the films of John Hughes; it was a terrible attempt to use comedy to propagandize for conservatism.

The very same things are true of The Daily Wire’s and Angel Studios’ productions and releases. Whether it is George Washington converting Native Americans into joyously celebrating Christ, or a very attractive young woman and her guns emerging victorious over school shooters, or a hardened combat veteran saving a feckless and impotent police force and a university from Islamic terrorists, the ideology comes first rather than emerging organically from a creative who is writing and talking about the world as they see it. That is the very heart of the trouble with most “conservative” entertainment: it is a polemic first and often only.