Conservatainment: the perennial right-wing plot to seize Hollywood from liberals.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

"I GOT WORRIED about the future of the country," says country music singer and 11-time Grammy nominee Ray Stevens. As a musician, Stevens wasn't too sure what he could do about the problems he saw. But he had a thought: "Maybe I can produce some records that will help get across conservative points of view."

And so Stevens set to work recording an album he describes as "full of patrioric songs and songs of political satire." By February 2011, a video version of his anti-illegal-immigration sing-along "Come to the USA"--in which Stevens dons both a cheap sombrero and an Arab headdress that appears to have been made from a sweatband and a kitchen towel--had been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube.

Stevens was in Washington, D.C., to perform and speak at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a yearly gathering of thousands of conservative politicians and activists. At a panel rifled "Pop Culture: An Influence or a Mirror?" the singer most famous for his '70s novelty hit "The Streak" looked uncertain and unprepared, but he did have one clear point. "My idea," he said at the top of his remarks, "is that we need better censors out there."

Conservative opinions about entertainment were bountiful at CPAC 2011, which also featured a panel on "Engaging Conservatives Through Pop Culture" Like Stevens, speakers often seemed confused about how to approach mainstream popular art- or, as many of them awkwardly called it, "the pop culture" They seemed simultaneously infatuated with its glamour, outraged at its moral and political leanings, drawn to its power, and jealously angry at liberal successes. Mostly, though, the right-wing culture mavens speaking before their ideological brethren seemed determined to reshape and repurpose the entertainment industry into a tool for conservative political evangelizing, creating not mere entertainment but conservatainment.

Although some took on the familiar conservative role of cultural scold, many of the criticisms were focused inward, on spotty conservative efforts to compete in the entertainment marketplace. Kevin McCullough runs a conservative media business called Xtreme Media and has long partnered with Alec Baldwin's younger brother Stephen, a 45-year-old actor who runs a "skateboarding ministry" and has starred in a series of ultralow-budget movies aimed at evangelical Christians. McCullough told the room, "We need to stop embarrassing ourselves in the pop culture format."

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