Politics & Power Quote by Pat Boone

Boone’s sentence is a neat little piece of culture-war ventriloquism: he starts by treating a sweeping judgment as self-evident, then uses that “obvious on the surface” framing to dare you to disagree. It’s rhetoric built for certainty, not proof. By declaring “quite true” and “in fact,” he preloads the claim with authority and invites the audience to experience recognition, not argument.

The real work happens in his stack of adjectives: “liberal and humanistic and relativistic.” It’s a deliberate bundling of terms that don’t naturally belong in the same moral bucket. “Humanistic” is usually a compliment, but in Boone’s construction it’s made suspect by association with “relativistic,” a word that, in conservative Christian discourse, signals loosened standards and the erosion of absolute truth. The repetition of “and” is telling, too: it’s not careful taxonomy; it’s a piling-on, a sense of cultural drift becoming a single, ominous current.

As a pop figure who built a clean-cut brand alongside mid-century American respectability, Boone is speaking less as a media critic than as a guardian of a threatened moral center. The context is decades of anxiety about Hollywood’s values and television’s role as an unofficial national curriculum. “Dramatic shows and comedies” covers basically everything people watch, implying the problem isn’t a few “bad” programs but the ambient air of entertainment itself.

Subtext: if you’re feeling uneasy about shifting norms around sex, family, religion, or authority, it’s not just you - it’s the script.