No valentines for conservative news sites? Questions have emerged as to why some right-wing, or presumed right-wing, outlets seemingly consider certain topics off limits.

This appears to include, e.g., voter fraud or COVID-shot side effects, even in a politicized environment in which the liberal corporate media is consistently branded as fake news.

Speaking with JD Rucker of Red Voice Media, Revolver News Founder Darren Beattie offered this theory:

There are so many politicians even, even moreso than on the media, but it’s reflected in certain quarters of the media as well, is they’ll talk about, ‘oh look at what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs,’ they’ll say, ‘oh look at the China balloon, look at the Chicom balloon.’ They’ll look up to the Chicom balloon, and they won’t see what’s right in front of their face, which is the day-to-day decline of our country. They’ll look at the Uighurs and say, ‘Oh look what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs.’ They won’t talk about the January 6 prisoners. It’s a sham. And It really kind of captures how kind of fake and trivial so much of the conservative or right-wing media cycle really is.

Maybe…people deep down know how screwed the situation is, and they just want to consume that information almost as an entertainment option, like kind of, like, oh, an escape. Like ‘I don’t really want to look at this dark stuff. I want to vent about AOC’s dress or I want to vent about some washed-up, fat pop star put on a devil suit and twerked around for a little bit. So I want to be outraged about that’…but there’s an understanding at least at some implicit level that this is bread-and-circuses stuff, and that’s a distraction….Whereas if there were more institutional and cultural power connected to the right, we’d probably feel more comfortable exploring the real things, but I think ultimately at some psychological level, it’s just depressing to talk about these things that people kind of don’t really expect any solution to, at least in the near term.

Related story: ‘FoxFakeNews is Terrible’? What’s Next for Trump and the Media?

Parenthetically, as expressed in a quote attributed to the late Andrew Breitbart, “politics is downstream from culture.”

As an apparent corollary when the institutional, anti-free-speech left seems intent on imposing censorship, James O’Keefe (who may or may not still be running Project Veritas) once said that “culture is downstream from data.”