A lot of conservatives just shrug when they see the latest outrage from the cultural elite.

“They are just trying to outrage us. Ignore them.”

It’s a tempting argument. Even compelling. It keeps us off the hook for watching the execrable events (I only watch clips, myself, because in between the outrages there is horrible boredom), and keeps our blood pressure low.

Why bother? We know who they are and don’t care what they think.

I think this is wrong. Not because I particularly care what Sam Smith thinks or does, as long as he does it somewhere I don’t have to deal with it. I can turn the channel. Most people do, right?

Here’s why you should care: these are the people who run our culture and teach our kids values. They shape the next generation’s attitudes. Demonstrably.

Sam Smith didn’t get an award for being outrageous, at least not directly. He got an award for performing an evil song that sold millions of listens, aimed directly at kids. This is true also for the people who gave him a standing ovation. Entry into the Grammys, Oscars, or any of the other countless awards shows is predicated on being successful in creating the soundtrack of kids’ lives, and that soundtrack has just as much of an effect in real life as it does when watching a movie.

Try watching a movie without the soundtrack. It is completely different, emotionally. Soundtracks often persist longer in the culture than in the movie itself. You can hear just a few bars of the Star Wars theme and be transported. It’s why we listen to music. Add to the music the performance, especially if it tells a story, and it can be mesmerizing.

If we ignore the awards shows, at least the key performances, we make ourselves ignorant of what is in the air that kids breathe. What creates attitudes? What can fuel social contagions that proliferate throughout the culture? What we see from these performers tells us what a lot of young people will be doing over the next few years. It goes from outré to normal.

The culture has shifted around us, and it was invisible to most of us until the damage was done. In just a few years we went from only being vaguely aware of the alphabet people to 1 out of 6 Gen Z–those who are around 18 right now–identifying as non-heterosexual. That includes all the colors of the rainbow. And the numbers are still skyrocketing. For one thing, the kids won’t have kids. Our culture is literally going to die off.

Our schools are pushing gender ideology and attacking every brick in the foundation of Western culture. Without a few brave souls like Chris Rufo and Matt Walsh, the heroes at Gays against Groomers, and some vilified parents, many of us still wouldn’t know. And we need to know if we are going to save our culture.

It’s tiresome to pay attention to the evil being pushed out by Hollywood and the music industry, but it is also necessary to understand the messages that children are being fed. Just as we have to keep up with the outrages that take place in schools, the pornography being pushed at kids in libraries, we must pay attention to celebrities. They are cultural barometers.

Keeping tabs on the cultural milieu tells us vital things about the culture’s health.

Yes, it’s true that every generation in the modern age complains about how awful things have gotten in entertainment. But have you considered how many of those complaints were actually valid? In the 50s adults complained about how Rock ‘n Roll would create a hyper-sexualized culture and drug abuse.

Was that true? Yes. Rock stars got away with sleeping with children, destroying others’ property, and rampant drug use and they were lionized for it. It actually was bad for the culture.

Many things we enjoy are not actually good for us, and we should confront that fact. I enjoy pop music, although I don’t consider much of what is churned out to be music. But I like catchy tunes, not-so-secretly bought Taylor Swift’s 1989, and admire a lot of the Rock classics from my youth. I enjoy bad foods, and that has made me fat. This is a bad thing, not just a fact of life.

Indisputably our culture has gone downhill in some very significant ways since we embraced a culture of excess, and the people who predicted it were right. There clearly is a connection between Rap and violence, Rock and drug use, and modern fashion and moral degeneracy (Balenciaga, anyone?).

We are normalizing cultural destruction. I believe that matters, and it requires pointing out, even if it makes us appear to be fuddy-duddies. So what? Is that so bad? Standing up against evil is rarely popular. Ever heard of the martyrs?

We, too, are part of the culture and have at least some power to take it back. Look at what DeSantis is doing in Florida. He is forcing sunlight onto the cultural vampires, and that too has an impact. Kids pay attention to everything in the culture, including the critics. They may not immediately embrace what we say, but it has an impact.

So I dissent from the “just ignore it” caucus. I don’t believe that a shrug is an appropriate response to promoting evil. It isn’t.

That makes me a fuddy-duddy, and that’s fine by me.