Culture War Vol. 1: Conservatives’ Modest Goals, Defined
What are the victory conditions for the Culture War? What would winning even look like for conservatives?
Everybody wants to fight it (or, let’s face it, look like they’re fighting it), but very few define what it means to win.
We know what the War on Drugs is supposed to accomplish: end the use of illegal drugs. The War on Terror attempts to stop the use of terrorism as a tactic, even though nobody got very serious about fighting it and our leaders refuse to name the enemy.
What about the Culture War?
Is it supposed to drive leftist messaging out of show business? Is the culture like a cruise ship, something that can be guided to a safe port of call? Who’s the captain, then? Who’s qualified to lead?
Maybe victory in the Culture War means something more modest: less progressive talking points in mass media.
Perhaps it includes national television channels thinking twice about putting that drag queen child Desmond on the air.
Or broadcasting wholesome entertainment the way they used to. A reboot of “Emergency!” or some such. Randolph Mantooth is still alive, after all.
If you’re going to call it a war, then you have to determine how to fight it, why you want to win, and what winning means.
Our culture is driven in large part by Hollywood and mass media. More people can name the principal characters in “Game of Thrones” than they can the books of the Bible. So Hollywood’s the “enemy,” right? Even though we inhale everything they produce like a kid quaffing down birthday cake.
Music’s a part of the culture, too. Just look at Miley Cyrus and her gigantic pink tongue, or Cardi B and her legions of clapping buttocks.
What about books, then? Nobody reads anymore. As a writer of books I hear this all the time. (My royalty statements suggest that may be true.)
RELATED: Google Attacks ‘Unplanned,’ Dubs Film ‘Propaganda’
Change has to come from within. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Deep down in your secret heart you have to decide there’s something that needs to be fixed before you can change it. So if you want to change the culture, you’re going to have to do it from the inside.
The bad news is that if you’re reading this, you’re officially on the outside. The people on the inside don’t think they’ve changed the culture enough. They’re still angry with you for not loving Desmond’s eye shadow, for not redefining the murder of babies in the womb as “women’s health care.”
They hate your deeply-held religious faith, your adherence to traditional values. Some even hate the idea of free speech. So the harder you try to pull the culture to the right, or at least to the middle, they pull a hundred times harder to the left.
You’re a Nazi. A bigot. A hater. And you’d better keep your mouth shut or they’ll deplatform you. Ruin your career. Zip it and watch “Chernobyl,” racist. Don’t you dare take the wrong lesson from it, either.
I still find it amusing that the producer of the series “Chernobyl” thought he was using it as a vehicle to attack Trump yet, in reality, he produced one of the most powerful indictments ever seen on television against Trump’s opponents. Epic.
— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) June 9, 2019
Hollywood is so flush with cash studios can afford to produce horrible woke reboots and politically charged trash projects that lose millions because they know they’ll make up the shortfall with the next “Avengers” movie.
And you will see it. The writers, directors and actors hate you.
Samuel Jackson about President Donald Trump: “This motherf–ker is like ruining the planet and all kinds of other crazy s–t,” the actor said. “And the people think that’s OK. It’s not f–king OK. And if you’re not saying anything, then you’re complicit.” https://t.co/tTYb8c7vp6
— Fjordman (@Fjordman1) March 16, 2019
Guardians of the Galaxy Director James Gunn Spews Hate at President Trump and His Supporters https://t.co/PEI4f2KS5G pic.twitter.com/s9J545lUj1
— Bounding Into Comics (@BoundingComics) June 19, 2018
But you’ll watch anyway. You’ll carp about the occasional middle finger stuck in your face, but you already paid full price for the ticket.
The Big Five book publishers in New York hire middle-class millennial women with liberal arts degrees to serve as manuscript gatekeepers. Good luck getting your non-woke book published. Try finding a decent new book to read. It’s SJWs all the way down.
And don’t forget the sensitivity readers: editors who have the fun job of determining if you’re the right color/gender to write the things you wrote, and will demand fundamental changes if your manuscript triggers them into conniptions.
Want to win the Culture War through indie publishing? The last person to change the culture by going indie was Hugh Howey with his mediocre-at-best “Wool” series, and all he did was encourage every person with access to a word processing program to self-publish a book. Difficult to find a culture-shifting pony in an Augean stables-sized mound of literary horse crap. Thank Hugh for that.
Art today is a horror story written by an imbecile who wouldn’t know an ascetic from an aesthetic. The last famous piece of art was Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” picture, and he stole the photo it was based on from an AP photographer.
Before that? Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Did you like funding it?
The less said about fashion, the better. Pink hair, blue hair, green hair: look up aposematism. All men are predators. Ugly is beautiful. Up is down and down is relative.
Our cultural leaders have redefined the genre of comedy to mean angry social/political screeds instead of observations that make normal people laugh. That’s how powerful they are.
Late-night comedy is dead. Long live “clapter.”
That’s what it looks like when your enemies win the Culture War: they ruin the things you like. Now you’re down to watching grainy “Carol Burnett Show” clips on YouTube.
So we know what happens when the bad guys win battles in the Culture War, but we don’t know what it looks like when our side wins.
Roseanne Barr is still off the air following one racially charged Tweet. Director James Gunn, infamous for telling disgusting stories about child molestation, is back to making movies for Disney, ostensibly a children’s entertainment company.
The “Star Wars” franchise is still run by Kathleen Kennedy, who hates everything about “Star Wars,” particularly its fans. And all of your complaints haven’t changed a thing. You’re spitting at a battleship. Where is your God now?
You can’t win. You can fight, and you should fight, but you can’t win.
In Part Two we’ll talk about ways to fight the Culture War. In the meantime, why don’t you say what winning the Culture War means in the comments below? What’s the objective? Name a goal that should be reached. What victories has the right won to wrest control of the culture from progressives?
David Dubrow likes to think of himself as a pony in the horse apples. Check out his Armageddon trilogy of Biblical horror/fantasy novels and the “Appalling Stories” series. Find him whinnying madly at his web site.