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Media Matters

Last updated on: January 21, 2026 at 3:15 pm by Dan Peterson

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Media Matters 2026-01-21T15:15:55-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Park City, Utah, where the late Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival will be held once more — beginning this Thursday — before it moves to Colorado. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

From the Deseret News: “Sundance rise, Sundance set: The independent film festival that Robert Redford built changed the industry and its host state. What does it mean now that it’s gone?”

I was deeply disappointed and quite sad when the news broke that the Sundance Film Festival was leaving the state of Utah for Boulder, Colorado. To the very, very limited degree that my adopted state enjoys any cultural cachet with opinion makers and culture generators, the Sundance Film Festival was a significant contributor. Each year, it drew the attention of powerful, well-connected people to Park City and immediately surrounding areas.

That said, frankly, the fit between Sundance and surrounding, culturally-conservative Utah was, umm, neither very great nor very obvious. I don’t find it at all difficult to understand those here who will be glad to see the back of it after this year’s instantiation.

But I wonder if anything might ever be found, or created, to replace it. I enjoyed seeing Utah as a place in which creativity and artistry are celebrated. Can we continue to do so? Can we perhaps continue to do so in a way that might conform a bit better to the values on which Utah was built and which, to a large extent, still inform, motivate, and mold its population?

When Sundance first announced its departure for the other side of the Rocky Mountains, Ryan Smith, who has invested a very great deal of money in Utah’s athletic scene, was quoted in the Deseret News (I think) as vowing that, yes, something would be built to replace Sundance. I hope that he still has such an intention, but I’ve seen nothing from him on the subject for quite a while.

Here’s one idea: Angel Studios, Inc., an American independent media company and film distribution studio based in Provo, Utah — near Brigham Young University, about a half-hour from Sundance Ski Resort, and a further half-hour from Park City — has enjoyed remarkable success with family-friendly, occasionally religious, morally serious movies. Could a film festival be built around such movies? Perhaps in league with Angel Studios? It would be a much better fit with the culture of Utah than Sundance ever was.

From left to right: Brigham Young, an unnamed man, and an admiring ox. (Still photograph taken on the set of Six Days in August by Russell D. Richins)

This afternoon, I recorded an interview with Greg Matsen on Cwíc Show. The focus was on Brigham Young, and I, at least, had a good time during our conversation. I think that the interview may go up online on Monday next.

In the meantime, here are a couple of short video trailers for Becoming Brigham. They’ll give you a taste of the way the series will look:

This AI-generated image was apparently shared by Mr. Trump on his Truth Social platform earlier today.

Several people are very upset with me because, mostly not here but on Facebook, I’ve posted a few overtly political comments or shared some overtly political memes. Believe me, I’m not happy about it either. My reluctant decision a few years ago to eschew taking public political stances was entirely sincere. But I think that the current administration has crossed a bright red line that does not allow me to remain silent. I hope that my political phase will be a temporary one and that I will soon be able to go back to being, yes, privately as opinionated as ever — as a federalist, limited-government, pro-life, constitutionalist, free-market-oriented and libertarian-adjacent, strict-constructionist, pro-defense, anti-socialist conservative — but thereafter publicly quiescent about partisan politics. One of the important elements of my personal brand of conservatism is that, ideally, neither the President of the United States nor the government in general should be a principal focus of our day-to-day lives, sucking up all of the oxygen in the room.

Does anybody, though, really think that the recent behavior of our president has been normal, or that it is in any way good for the world or for America?

I’m not at all a fan of Vice President J. D. Vance. It’s not clear to me what his core principles are, if indeed he actually has any, but I really do think that we’ve probably entered into territory where the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, if it’s ever going to be more than mere window-dressing, ought to be seriously considered.

And, yes, I think that we were in Twenty-Fifth Amendment territory with President Joe Biden, the full extent of whose cognitive decline was concealed from the American people during his time in the White House. Moreover, had the Twenty-Fifth Amendment existed then — it was only ratified in 1967 — it should surely have been invoked in the case of Woodrow Wilson and perhaps even with regard to John F. Kennedy, whose dependency on a potent mix of drugs was largely kept hidden until years after his death.

And, please, if you feel an overpowering urge to attack me as a Democrat, a “libtard,” a Marxist, a Communist, a supporter of Somali fraudsters, sympathetic to terrorism, a fan of uncontrolled borders, an anti-American, and an anti-Mormon apostate — all of which I’ve been called many times, including during the past few days — do try to resist that urge. I’m far from any of those things. And I neither supported Joe Biden nor voted for Kamala Harris. Thank you for your attention to this matter. -dcp

An aerial photo, by buzzard525, either of Greenland today or of Florida in the nuclear winter that might ensue in the wake of World War Three (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

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