On November 12, 1986, I found myself exchanging a fart joke with Bill Berry, the drummer for R.E.M. The band had just finished a show at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and my college roommate got to see them after the show. One of us, and I think it was Berry, was wearing a Guinness beer button. I joked about too much Guinness causing gas. Berry laughed.
I recall this anecdote because it reveals how America once provided a space for artists to develop and become forces. I’d watched R.E.M. go from playing small clubs like the 9:30 in D.C. to college venues to arenas. They started with a small, independent label, IRS, to the big time and Warner Brothers.
There’s a lesson in that for conservatives who want to change the culture. For the past 50 years the right’s had a poor cultural strategy. We react to the larger liberal culture instead of supporting burgeoning conservative artists when they need resources the most. The left has Hollywood, television, music and publishing because they’ve worked for over a century to build the infrastructure to succeed. They supported a band like R.E.M. when the band was playing small clubs and bars. They offered community and resources when it was needed the most.
For the past year I’ve been producing an Anti-Communist Film Festival. The idea came after attending many festivals over the years, and coming across great anti-communist films such as Trial, Freedom’s Fury, Hail, Caesar!, and The Lives of Others. An Anti-Communist Film Festival in Washington, D.C. is an idea that’s needed now, when Marxism is on the rise among young people and New York City has a socialist mayor.
I’ve visited theaters about renting their space—some said no—as well as talking to people at the movie studios about licensing and conversing with bright young directors about their future projects. I got the Victims of Communism Foundation on board as sponsor.
I’m now working fulltime as the Director of the Anti-Communist Film Festival. It’s clear that the festival is a concept that people get right away. This isn’t a boring lecture delivered at some dry conservative think tank. These are movies. It’s sexy, glamorous and fun. If conservatives mean what they say about fighting for the culture, is they’re capable of seeing into the future and realizing that the Anti-Communist Film Festival could blossom into an annual event with an impact on young people and the political discourse, they’ll fully fund it and continue into the future.
The Anti-Communist Film Festival will teach essential lessons. The centerpiece is The Lives of Others, the great 2006 film about the East German Stasi. 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, which was written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. It is, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “an indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police, whose network of informers was so vast that fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll—a network of fear and shame worthy of George Orwell’s 1984.”
The Lives of Others stands as a metaphor for America in 2026. The Stasi, like the modern American left, used shame as a weapon. Too many artists in both cases went along with totalitarian oppression. Whereas tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin repressed artists, the German Stasi worked with them, understanding their potential for spreading propaganda. In America in 2026, too many actors, writers and comedians mindlessly go along with the Left. We don’t expect or demand that they agree with President Trump. Just that they use critical thinking—especially about socialist leaders like New York’s Zohran Mamdani.
The Lives of Others dramatizes the role of shame in leftist politics. In an academic paper on The Lives of Others, historian Hans Lofgren explores the deep power of shame to alter our lives. “Stare long enough into the eyes of a dog who does not know you, and he will begin to bark. Many animals, human beings among them, experience the stare as threatening aggression. But, unlike other animals, human beings can feel shame at being exposed to an unwavering look, a look which threatens the private self that is only shared in deeply trusting relationships.”
We also want to make a statement about artistic freedom. On October 25, 1991, the German singer and poet Wolf Biermann was awarded the Buchner Prize, Germany’s highest honor for literature. During his acceptance speech, Biermann—once branded an enemy of the state—lamented how many writers had informed for the Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. Biermann blasted writer Sascha Anderson, one of many writers who was an informer for the Stasi. Biermann noted that there had been few “bright stars” and “upright citizens” under the communists. Instead, Germany had seen too many “self-pitying, well-nourished subjects,” while even opposition groups had been “eaten away by the Stasi metastases.”
Every year the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C. puts on various film festivals—the Labor Film Festival, the Environmental Film Festival, Movies of the 1950s, the Irish Film Festival, etc. These are educational gatherings where people can celebrate artistry and freedom. They recently held one celebrating the brilliant anti-communist Polish director Andrzej Wajd.