Most of the entries were far more crudely made than the documentaries they aim to challenge. Several entries, including Meyer's apocalyptic home video, amounted to little more than a single guy spinning theories before the camera. It was a festival about reaction, not creation, devoted largely to conspiracy theories and attacks on liberal culture. Of the two narrative features shown, one of them, "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," a hagiographic (and roundly criticized) account of George Bush's response to the World Trade Center attacks, aired more than a year ago on Showtime and has just been released on DVD.

One of the more amusingly bad selections was Jack Cashill's "Mega Fix," in which Cashill, a thin, craggy man with a reassuringly amiable voice, delivers a lunatic monologue about Bill Clinton and terrorism. According to Cashill, a columnist for WorldNet Daily, Islamic terrorists, some with ties to Iraq, were behind the Oklahoma City bombing, the downing of Flight 800 and the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Clinton, corrupt and pusillanimous, covered all this up because he didn't want to go to war. His Justice Department preferred to pin the blame for Oklahoma City on "these two perfect specimens of right-wing American manhood" because it would help them discredit Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolutionists of 1994.

Amazingly, Cashill's film wasn't the most outlandish documentary on offer. It was trumped by "Innocents Betrayed," which attributes most of the 20th century's genocides, as well as lynching, the Japanese-American internment and the rape of Nanking, to gun control. Jumping from country to country, it first explains how a particular government passed laws limiting the ownership of weapons, and then cuts to pornographic montages of mutilated corpses. Walking out, a conservative journalist from Washington looked at me and said, "OK, that was offensive."

Weak as the festivals' films were, the event represented a new front in the right's ongoing project of creating a parallel popular culture for denizens of the red states, a project that's been notably successful in other areas. There's Fox News. There is the "Left Behind" series, the bestselling books of fiction in America. As Adam Green reported in the New Yorker, the "frantic, aggressive, and caustic" right-wing comic Brad Stine is playing to packed houses and developing a sitcom. There are Christian rock acts who in many cases look indistinguishable from their MTV counterparts and who draw crowds as large as many bands whom we think of as "mainstream." Even as this year's Lollapalooza was canceled due to poor ticket sales, and the press was full of stories about a summer concert slump, the Christian rock Creation Festival in Pennsylvania drew 50,000, more than Lollapalooza garnered in the same state at its height in the mid-1990s.

The success of Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" was clearly the animating force for the festival. But the would-be auteurs seemed unable to grasp the inclusive, populist approach of Moore's filmmaking. Sure, progressives hate Bush, but most don't want to crush his followers. The filmmakers at the American Renaissance, though, direct their fury at anonymous, everyday lefties at least as much as at Democratic politicians. Liberal-baiting was the weekend's preferred sport. Some of the loudest cheers came after a short film from the Protest Warriors, a group that specializes in barreling into antiwar protests with right-wing signs, waiting for the inevitable obnoxious punks to start screaming and pushing them, and then capturing it all on video as proof of the fascism lurking beneath liberal bromides.

"Operation Eagle Strike," made by Protest Warriors Kfir Alfia and Alan Davidson, was part of a program of shorts. The bill included a sympathetic look at the exploits of Ann Coulter and a 45-minute documentary about double standards and p.c. excesses on college campuses, called "Brainwashing 101." The latter was one of the better things in the festival, capturing very real abuses of conservative students' First Amendment rights by doctrinaire administrators and hysterical speech codes. It included an account of a college Republican dragged through a grueling disciplinary process after hanging a flier for a conservative event at his campus's multicultural center, an incident that should rile civil libertarians of all persuasions.

The Protest Warriors told a far less convincing tale of conservative struggle. A story about a confrontation between two sets of braying ideologues, it was filmed at an October antiwar demonstration in Washington that was sponsored by the loathsome Stalinist sect ANSWER. ANSWER, which is actually pro-Saddam Hussein and pro-Kim Jong Il, is the fulfillment of every right-wing fantasy about the left, and it made a succulent target for the young Protest Warriors. They, in turn, labor mightily to match their enemies in mulish righteousness.

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