Andrew Sullivan is another one. Wonder what he thinks about his guy DeSantis now. He has started banging the drum about the Trump threat, but he sure did his part to enable Trump and the GOP in the Biden years with his anti-woke hysteria.
Yeah that one's a real shame. Back in the blog days, Sullivan's platform and audience was one of the most wide open, smart, thoughtful places I spent online time in. He was very smart, and had strong opinions, but readers would chime in and disagree, speaking from personal experience, and the discussions were really informative, funny and smart. And people (including Andrew) acknowledged each other's insights and their own shifts in understanding. The new woke-obsessed ranting version was such a terrible disappointment!
Literally all he talked about for 4 years were how non white immigrants and trans people were bad. Now a brief has been filed to the Supreme Court by Republican to overturn Obergefell. I have never seen a better example of voting against your own interest in my life.
The Free Press was very silly about economics. Clueless Tyler Cowen. Like a Republican tea party level of analysis: the socialists are coming …! Uh, no, they are not. They prefer Scandinavia, thank you very much.
Yeah. Rogan gave people permission to focus on the one issue where they agreed with conservatives (in his case, primarily, as I recall, COVID-related restrictions) and make it more important than every issue where they agreed with progressives.
Even before his opinions solidified on numerous issues, he would still do stuff like make a claim and only then ask his producer to fact-check him, which would take a little while, which in the podcast format meant that you would get people switching off in between the claim and the fact check and thus never hearing that Rogan was, in fact, wrong.
Another great essay. It seems very difficult for normal people to understand that people who are emotionally stunted can be "smart" and wrong at the same time. People with childhood emotional handicaps do not have self-confidence; they turn their intelligence to conniving and bullying. Their identity is constructed, not natural. They are at least slightly paranoid because they are not achievers in the normal sense -- they are compensating. They are incapable of seeing things straight on, because their emotional deprivation requires a bulwark of self-oriented (narcissistic) fantasy. We have a problem borne of accepting these people at face value, when a depth assessment is -- as shown in this essay -- that they are not emotionally equipped to be part of normal society, able to get along and cooperate with people of different backgrounds. They have attached themselves to a predatory culture of sociopaths and psychopaths who turn every advantage into permanent gain, knowing no limits as normal people do, and no real satisfaction other than predatory success. The rest of us have to stay awake in our own defense, or wake up to the now-existential threat. Paranoia leads ultimately to fascism -- the ultimate bullying of normal people they fear for being normal and successful, happy people.
Good summary Mike. If only folks were more aware of the consequences of their cognitive biases. One could hear the echo of Tversky and Kahneman in your writing. Well done. Keep up the good work.
Brock's thinking is incisive. The problem, dear "Brutus," is that when you are on a ship, big or small, you get nowhere peeing off the bow into a headwind. The audience (i.e., the citizenry, electorate) has directed their lives towards "economy" (i.e., greed, self-aggrandizement, self-interest). What we have too much of in the US is not LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) but far too much AIL (apathy, indifference to cause, lack of unity). When you combine a lack of LUV with a profusion of AIL, you have the perfect recipe (storm) for disaster.
Yes, wokeism is for many, including me, intrusive and often obnoxious. But as Brock has repeatedly written, we cannot or should not equate the "cons" of Democracy with the lethal pathology of authoritarianism. What we have in the US is growing Fascism. It is not that we are approaching Fascism, but that it has arrived, and we opened our doors to it. It is here for anyone with a few functioning neurons.
The problem is that America has become a stupid nation, one that has grown fat and lazy and obsessed with getting and spending. A country that can elect a con man, a wheeler-dealer, a being open to raping the environment (drill baby drill), and flagrantly enriching himself and his family (violating the Emolument Clause of the US Constitution). It is a pathetic and pathological nation. I do not think it is worth the effort to comment on those who equate Democratic Party wrongs with GOP wrongs. "Well, Biden was corrupt too." That's just such idiocy. And when I speak over breakfast with some "successful" person and they aver that the 2020 national election was stolen, I have to conclude that what we have is not a problem in communication, but a disaster in clear thinking and a failure to check facts. The image that Brock selected tells it all:
"A nation of sheep will soon have a government of wolves." That is actually wrong; our nation has a government of wolves, and they will devour all that has been good about Democracy both at home and in the world. We are seeing our President, trump democracy with fascism. We are witnessing Ukraine tossed to the ravenous, insatiable Putin; we are seeing one violation after another of the US Constitution, and guess what: the band played on.
The Nation, the "patient" is in dire straits. The Nation is a code Red, literally and figuratively. We are now a Nation that is a Russian asset. This is WWIII, and it is not "Operation Market Garden" as in WWII, but "DOGE" or Destroy our Great Experiment.
A real friend tells you if you have parsley stuck to your front teeth or if you have bad breath. I am telling you, citizens of America, that your mental lassitude, your apathy, your attention deficit "syndrome" has led to the shit-storm we currently face. My life is just about spent. I will turn 83 in another two weeks, but my children, and yours, have been left a most horrible legacy. You have made your bed; now see how well your children and grandchildren sleep.
Woke has always been about addressing real harms to actual people's. Anti-woke ignores those harms. Sometimes it offers a solution that is unavailable to most of those harmed (like economic opportunity) but that's just another way of dismissing the harm itself. Legal and regulatory redress to social, psychological, cultural, economic, environmental, and political harms are blunt instruments at best. That the harms occur across demographic groups complicates matters. A great part of the Right dismisses the harms because they are responsible for them or complicit in them. That's a far greater burden of conscience than any overreach on the Left seeking to redress harm. Conscience, however, seems to be the first victim in the rise of fascism.
I, on occasion read Taibbi and Weiss, the others not so much, more because of time and not because of aversion to view point. But for a moment, I thought you were describing the WSJ editorial board, which we know has little idea what proportionality means.
Good analysis. I agree. Their inability to think bigger than their brands is akin to the general stupidity of reactionary politicians pushing anecdotes as evidence—and the idiocy of a good chunk of the electorate liking what they hear. Statistical and probabilistic literacy are less important than the soft weighted blanket of cognitive bias.
Brock mischaracterizes Weiss, Hughes, and Kisin. (I agree with Brock regarding Taibi and Greenwald.) Yes, they focus on the excesses of the Left, but they certainly identify the corruption of the Right. Kisin is British and his outrage at the Illiberalism (including numerous cases of arrests of those who challenge leftist dogma, especially trans ideology), rapid economic decline, and a tsunami of illegal immigration in his homeland are justified. Nor is it irrational to worry the U.S. could, without a corrective, end up there too.
We face two menaces in the U.S.: the Leftist capture of culture (the Arts, Education, Publishing, Human Resources, Psychology, MSM) and the MAGA authoritarian assault on our constitutional democracy. Which is worse? It’s not obvious. Both are destroying our country. If MAGA were suddenly defeated, would the U.S. be “saved”? No. Weis, Hughes, and Kisin are important critical voices. (If you want a balanced critique of the two evils from a single person, I think Sam Harris is decent.)
My dear fellow, you've just provided a masterful demonstration of the very false equivalence I'm critiquing while somehow missing the irony entirely. You claim these figures 'certainly identify the corruption of the Right' while simultaneously arguing that 'leftist capture of culture' is equivalent to 'MAGA authoritarian assault on our constitutional democracy.' Do you not hear yourself?
One side controls human resources departments and publishes books you don't like. The other side is using the FBI to raid former officials for writing books, deploying military forces against American cities, and extorting universities through federal funding threats. If you think those represent comparable threats to American democracy, then you've succumbed to exactly the availability bias that made these figures so catastrophically wrong about proportional threat assessment.
'Which is worse? It's not obvious,' you say. Really? Sam Harris—whom you cite approvingly—specifically criticized this very tendency among moderates to suggest it was hard to discern which side was worse. He maintained serious concerns about progressive excess while still clearly supporting Kamala Harris because he understood the fundamental asymmetry between campus speech codes and constitutional destruction.
If after watching Trump systematically dismantle constitutional constraints while your supposed 'balanced critics' obsessed over pronouns, you still think the choice between diversity training and FBI raids requires careful deliberation, then you've learned absolutely nothing from watching democracy collapse in real-time.
Harris got it right precisely because he didn't fall into the availability trap that captured Weiss, Hughes, and Kisin. He proved that you can criticize progressive excess without losing the capacity for proportional threat assessment.
My dear fellow, we assess the severity and probability of the dangers differently, therefore, the proportionality.
You wave away the social costs of trans activism as “obsessed over pronouns.” The pronouns themselves are not insignificant (it is a technique to shame dissenters—I observe this directly—and pressure people to implicitly endorse a comprehensive ideology), but it’s less important than women losing private, protected spaces, children making life-altering medical choices based on fraudulent claims and shoddy studies, destroying the careers and reputations of reasonable anti-trans ideology critics, and women being robbed of athletic awards after years of rigorous training. Most significantly, the ideology erases one of the most fundamental realities of Nature—binary sex, along with average genetic-based psychological differences between males and females—one that has a massive influence on a society. Likewise, it buttresses the odious belief on the Left and in academia that humans are “blank slates,” amenable to social programming.
You minimize the ideological brainwashing in universities. Trump’s response is heavy handed—though largely legal—but universities have no right to federal funding if they punish dissent and fail to teach multiple viewpoints and critical thinking. The impact on certain science research is unfortunate, but historically, reductions in public funding of science were made up by industry. If certain universities, especially private ones, can’t survive without federal funding, then they don’t deserve to exist.
The harassment of Bolton and others is wrong (though Bolton may have violated the law). The politicization of the Justice department is outrageous. But thus far, these actions affect a relatively small number of people. Culture affects everyone, every day, and will for generations.
DEI is blatantly discriminatory. That’s trivial? You completely misrepresent the problem in Publishing. I don’t care if they publish books or ideas I “don’t like.” I object to the repression (and punishment of authors) of literature and non-fiction that strays from a Leftist narrative. They do not do this for marketing and financial reasons, but because the majority of young people in this industry are leftist and threaten their employers if they publish things THEY “don’t like.”
You say “American cities” (plural) as if federal troops have invaded the country. It’s two cities. L.A., not without some justification given violence against federal agents, and subsequently restricted by the courts. And Washington, D.C., which has a unique constitutional status, and federal law enforcement very well may be legal. Are these concerning actions, yes. But limited and constrained so far.
Given the risk to democracy, Trump is the greater immediate danger. I held my nose and voted for Harris. But Leftist culture has reigned supreme for decades, and solid evidence indicates it has degraded all aspects of our society. As I said, Britain is a useful test case.
With Trump, at least the Supreme Court is still functioning as a reasonable guard rail. We’ll see if it holds. If not, then my judgement on proportionality will change. Despite the real dangers, I predict that Trumpism will diminish long before the destructive leftist domination of our culture. Therefore, vigorous critical voices of the Left are vital and will be relevant beyond the current political crisis.
You claim we've been "living under leftist culture for decades"—which raises the obvious question: what exactly was this golden alternative you're mourning? The imaginary America of Leave it to Beaver where everyone knew their place and social problems could be solved with firm handshakes and moral lectures?
That cultural ideal never existed outside television sitcoms. What did exist was the actual America where women couldn't get credit cards, Black Americans were systematically excluded from wealth-building, and gay Americans lived in terror of state persecution. Should we have been taking our moral guidance from frauds like Jerry Falwell, who resurrected Confederate ideology by wrapping it in biblical language and convincing millions that their tribal resentment was holy?
Falwell's "traditional values" were Confederate values with theological packaging—the same belief that a righteous minority has the moral authority to impose its vision on an unworthy majority, backed by claims about divine law that conveniently aligned with existing racial and gender hierarchies.
The "leftist cultural domination" you're describing was actually just the gradual inclusion of people who had been systematically excluded from American cultural life. Women entering professions, Black Americans accessing higher education, LGBTQ Americans demanding basic dignity—this wasn't cultural conquest but cultural expansion.
Your nostalgic fantasy of superior conservative culture ignores that we elected Republicans to the presidency for 20 of the last 44 years, that conservative media dominated talk radio and cable news for decades, that the Supreme Court maintained a conservative majority for generations, that corporate America spent those same decades systematically dismantling labor protections and concentrating wealth upward.
What exactly was "leftist" about building the most unequal society in the developed world while maintaining the world's largest military-industrial complex? What was "progressive" about the systematic corporate capture of regulatory agencies, the financialization of everything from housing to healthcare, the transformation of higher education into debt-extraction mechanisms?
The culture you're mourning was always a fiction designed to obscure the actual America—a country whose early systematic exclusion gave way to an America that gradually, imperfectly, began including people who had been kept out. That inclusion created backlash from those who preferred the exclusion, but calling that backlash "traditional values" doesn't make it morally legitimate.
Andrew Sullivan is another one. Wonder what he thinks about his guy DeSantis now. He has started banging the drum about the Trump threat, but he sure did his part to enable Trump and the GOP in the Biden years with his anti-woke hysteria.
Yeah that one's a real shame. Back in the blog days, Sullivan's platform and audience was one of the most wide open, smart, thoughtful places I spent online time in. He was very smart, and had strong opinions, but readers would chime in and disagree, speaking from personal experience, and the discussions were really informative, funny and smart. And people (including Andrew) acknowledged each other's insights and their own shifts in understanding. The new woke-obsessed ranting version was such a terrible disappointment!
He likes lowered taxes and figured gays are in enough with the republicans—
Literally all he talked about for 4 years were how non white immigrants and trans people were bad. Now a brief has been filed to the Supreme Court by Republican to overturn Obergefell. I have never seen a better example of voting against your own interest in my life.
This is all why I had to unsubscribe from these contrarian spaces and pods. I think we can safely say now that the mask is all the way off!
The Free Press was very silly about economics. Clueless Tyler Cowen. Like a Republican tea party level of analysis: the socialists are coming …! Uh, no, they are not. They prefer Scandinavia, thank you very much.
Two words: Joe Rogan.
He’s the godfather of this and should have been included in Mike’s essay as example number 1.
Yeah. Rogan gave people permission to focus on the one issue where they agreed with conservatives (in his case, primarily, as I recall, COVID-related restrictions) and make it more important than every issue where they agreed with progressives.
Even before his opinions solidified on numerous issues, he would still do stuff like make a claim and only then ask his producer to fact-check him, which would take a little while, which in the podcast format meant that you would get people switching off in between the claim and the fact check and thus never hearing that Rogan was, in fact, wrong.
Another great essay. It seems very difficult for normal people to understand that people who are emotionally stunted can be "smart" and wrong at the same time. People with childhood emotional handicaps do not have self-confidence; they turn their intelligence to conniving and bullying. Their identity is constructed, not natural. They are at least slightly paranoid because they are not achievers in the normal sense -- they are compensating. They are incapable of seeing things straight on, because their emotional deprivation requires a bulwark of self-oriented (narcissistic) fantasy. We have a problem borne of accepting these people at face value, when a depth assessment is -- as shown in this essay -- that they are not emotionally equipped to be part of normal society, able to get along and cooperate with people of different backgrounds. They have attached themselves to a predatory culture of sociopaths and psychopaths who turn every advantage into permanent gain, knowing no limits as normal people do, and no real satisfaction other than predatory success. The rest of us have to stay awake in our own defense, or wake up to the now-existential threat. Paranoia leads ultimately to fascism -- the ultimate bullying of normal people they fear for being normal and successful, happy people.
Or are they just being paid by foreign adversaries to blow up American democracy. Maybe they know exactly what they are doing.
Good summary Mike. If only folks were more aware of the consequences of their cognitive biases. One could hear the echo of Tversky and Kahneman in your writing. Well done. Keep up the good work.
Brock's thinking is incisive. The problem, dear "Brutus," is that when you are on a ship, big or small, you get nowhere peeing off the bow into a headwind. The audience (i.e., the citizenry, electorate) has directed their lives towards "economy" (i.e., greed, self-aggrandizement, self-interest). What we have too much of in the US is not LUV (Legacy, Unity, Vision) but far too much AIL (apathy, indifference to cause, lack of unity). When you combine a lack of LUV with a profusion of AIL, you have the perfect recipe (storm) for disaster.
Yes, wokeism is for many, including me, intrusive and often obnoxious. But as Brock has repeatedly written, we cannot or should not equate the "cons" of Democracy with the lethal pathology of authoritarianism. What we have in the US is growing Fascism. It is not that we are approaching Fascism, but that it has arrived, and we opened our doors to it. It is here for anyone with a few functioning neurons.
The problem is that America has become a stupid nation, one that has grown fat and lazy and obsessed with getting and spending. A country that can elect a con man, a wheeler-dealer, a being open to raping the environment (drill baby drill), and flagrantly enriching himself and his family (violating the Emolument Clause of the US Constitution). It is a pathetic and pathological nation. I do not think it is worth the effort to comment on those who equate Democratic Party wrongs with GOP wrongs. "Well, Biden was corrupt too." That's just such idiocy. And when I speak over breakfast with some "successful" person and they aver that the 2020 national election was stolen, I have to conclude that what we have is not a problem in communication, but a disaster in clear thinking and a failure to check facts. The image that Brock selected tells it all:
"A nation of sheep will soon have a government of wolves." That is actually wrong; our nation has a government of wolves, and they will devour all that has been good about Democracy both at home and in the world. We are seeing our President, trump democracy with fascism. We are witnessing Ukraine tossed to the ravenous, insatiable Putin; we are seeing one violation after another of the US Constitution, and guess what: the band played on.
The Nation, the "patient" is in dire straits. The Nation is a code Red, literally and figuratively. We are now a Nation that is a Russian asset. This is WWIII, and it is not "Operation Market Garden" as in WWII, but "DOGE" or Destroy our Great Experiment.
A real friend tells you if you have parsley stuck to your front teeth or if you have bad breath. I am telling you, citizens of America, that your mental lassitude, your apathy, your attention deficit "syndrome" has led to the shit-storm we currently face. My life is just about spent. I will turn 83 in another two weeks, but my children, and yours, have been left a most horrible legacy. You have made your bed; now see how well your children and grandchildren sleep.
As Mark Maron put it, the Democrats annoyed the average American into fascism
Woke has always been about addressing real harms to actual people's. Anti-woke ignores those harms. Sometimes it offers a solution that is unavailable to most of those harmed (like economic opportunity) but that's just another way of dismissing the harm itself. Legal and regulatory redress to social, psychological, cultural, economic, environmental, and political harms are blunt instruments at best. That the harms occur across demographic groups complicates matters. A great part of the Right dismisses the harms because they are responsible for them or complicit in them. That's a far greater burden of conscience than any overreach on the Left seeking to redress harm. Conscience, however, seems to be the first victim in the rise of fascism.
"This isn’t objective analysis—it’s cognitive capture disguised as intellectual sophistication."
"You become professionally invested in being wrong about the relative dangers facing democracy."
"It’s like declaring grammar police a greater threat to English literature than book burners while helping the book burners eliminate libraries."
Prescient words!! I would call it hypocrisy, but it's almost too subtle for that -- collective gaslighting comes to mind
Thank you!
I was led to believe Notes from the Circus was a place for thoughtful commentary and discussion. Alas, it is simply one more pathetic echo chamber.
Much as people have channeled 1984 and Brave New World, I do think Moby Dick is a useful tale for the age we’re in.
I, on occasion read Taibbi and Weiss, the others not so much, more because of time and not because of aversion to view point. But for a moment, I thought you were describing the WSJ editorial board, which we know has little idea what proportionality means.
Good analysis. I agree. Their inability to think bigger than their brands is akin to the general stupidity of reactionary politicians pushing anecdotes as evidence—and the idiocy of a good chunk of the electorate liking what they hear. Statistical and probabilistic literacy are less important than the soft weighted blanket of cognitive bias.
Brock mischaracterizes Weiss, Hughes, and Kisin. (I agree with Brock regarding Taibi and Greenwald.) Yes, they focus on the excesses of the Left, but they certainly identify the corruption of the Right. Kisin is British and his outrage at the Illiberalism (including numerous cases of arrests of those who challenge leftist dogma, especially trans ideology), rapid economic decline, and a tsunami of illegal immigration in his homeland are justified. Nor is it irrational to worry the U.S. could, without a corrective, end up there too.
We face two menaces in the U.S.: the Leftist capture of culture (the Arts, Education, Publishing, Human Resources, Psychology, MSM) and the MAGA authoritarian assault on our constitutional democracy. Which is worse? It’s not obvious. Both are destroying our country. If MAGA were suddenly defeated, would the U.S. be “saved”? No. Weis, Hughes, and Kisin are important critical voices. (If you want a balanced critique of the two evils from a single person, I think Sam Harris is decent.)
My dear fellow, you've just provided a masterful demonstration of the very false equivalence I'm critiquing while somehow missing the irony entirely. You claim these figures 'certainly identify the corruption of the Right' while simultaneously arguing that 'leftist capture of culture' is equivalent to 'MAGA authoritarian assault on our constitutional democracy.' Do you not hear yourself?
One side controls human resources departments and publishes books you don't like. The other side is using the FBI to raid former officials for writing books, deploying military forces against American cities, and extorting universities through federal funding threats. If you think those represent comparable threats to American democracy, then you've succumbed to exactly the availability bias that made these figures so catastrophically wrong about proportional threat assessment.
'Which is worse? It's not obvious,' you say. Really? Sam Harris—whom you cite approvingly—specifically criticized this very tendency among moderates to suggest it was hard to discern which side was worse. He maintained serious concerns about progressive excess while still clearly supporting Kamala Harris because he understood the fundamental asymmetry between campus speech codes and constitutional destruction.
If after watching Trump systematically dismantle constitutional constraints while your supposed 'balanced critics' obsessed over pronouns, you still think the choice between diversity training and FBI raids requires careful deliberation, then you've learned absolutely nothing from watching democracy collapse in real-time.
Harris got it right precisely because he didn't fall into the availability trap that captured Weiss, Hughes, and Kisin. He proved that you can criticize progressive excess without losing the capacity for proportional threat assessment.
Civil war…. omg
My dear fellow, we assess the severity and probability of the dangers differently, therefore, the proportionality.
You wave away the social costs of trans activism as “obsessed over pronouns.” The pronouns themselves are not insignificant (it is a technique to shame dissenters—I observe this directly—and pressure people to implicitly endorse a comprehensive ideology), but it’s less important than women losing private, protected spaces, children making life-altering medical choices based on fraudulent claims and shoddy studies, destroying the careers and reputations of reasonable anti-trans ideology critics, and women being robbed of athletic awards after years of rigorous training. Most significantly, the ideology erases one of the most fundamental realities of Nature—binary sex, along with average genetic-based psychological differences between males and females—one that has a massive influence on a society. Likewise, it buttresses the odious belief on the Left and in academia that humans are “blank slates,” amenable to social programming.
You minimize the ideological brainwashing in universities. Trump’s response is heavy handed—though largely legal—but universities have no right to federal funding if they punish dissent and fail to teach multiple viewpoints and critical thinking. The impact on certain science research is unfortunate, but historically, reductions in public funding of science were made up by industry. If certain universities, especially private ones, can’t survive without federal funding, then they don’t deserve to exist.
The harassment of Bolton and others is wrong (though Bolton may have violated the law). The politicization of the Justice department is outrageous. But thus far, these actions affect a relatively small number of people. Culture affects everyone, every day, and will for generations.
DEI is blatantly discriminatory. That’s trivial? You completely misrepresent the problem in Publishing. I don’t care if they publish books or ideas I “don’t like.” I object to the repression (and punishment of authors) of literature and non-fiction that strays from a Leftist narrative. They do not do this for marketing and financial reasons, but because the majority of young people in this industry are leftist and threaten their employers if they publish things THEY “don’t like.”
You say “American cities” (plural) as if federal troops have invaded the country. It’s two cities. L.A., not without some justification given violence against federal agents, and subsequently restricted by the courts. And Washington, D.C., which has a unique constitutional status, and federal law enforcement very well may be legal. Are these concerning actions, yes. But limited and constrained so far.
Given the risk to democracy, Trump is the greater immediate danger. I held my nose and voted for Harris. But Leftist culture has reigned supreme for decades, and solid evidence indicates it has degraded all aspects of our society. As I said, Britain is a useful test case.
With Trump, at least the Supreme Court is still functioning as a reasonable guard rail. We’ll see if it holds. If not, then my judgement on proportionality will change. Despite the real dangers, I predict that Trumpism will diminish long before the destructive leftist domination of our culture. Therefore, vigorous critical voices of the Left are vital and will be relevant beyond the current political crisis.
You claim we've been "living under leftist culture for decades"—which raises the obvious question: what exactly was this golden alternative you're mourning? The imaginary America of Leave it to Beaver where everyone knew their place and social problems could be solved with firm handshakes and moral lectures?
That cultural ideal never existed outside television sitcoms. What did exist was the actual America where women couldn't get credit cards, Black Americans were systematically excluded from wealth-building, and gay Americans lived in terror of state persecution. Should we have been taking our moral guidance from frauds like Jerry Falwell, who resurrected Confederate ideology by wrapping it in biblical language and convincing millions that their tribal resentment was holy?
Falwell's "traditional values" were Confederate values with theological packaging—the same belief that a righteous minority has the moral authority to impose its vision on an unworthy majority, backed by claims about divine law that conveniently aligned with existing racial and gender hierarchies.
The "leftist cultural domination" you're describing was actually just the gradual inclusion of people who had been systematically excluded from American cultural life. Women entering professions, Black Americans accessing higher education, LGBTQ Americans demanding basic dignity—this wasn't cultural conquest but cultural expansion.
Your nostalgic fantasy of superior conservative culture ignores that we elected Republicans to the presidency for 20 of the last 44 years, that conservative media dominated talk radio and cable news for decades, that the Supreme Court maintained a conservative majority for generations, that corporate America spent those same decades systematically dismantling labor protections and concentrating wealth upward.
What exactly was "leftist" about building the most unequal society in the developed world while maintaining the world's largest military-industrial complex? What was "progressive" about the systematic corporate capture of regulatory agencies, the financialization of everything from housing to healthcare, the transformation of higher education into debt-extraction mechanisms?
The culture you're mourning was always a fiction designed to obscure the actual America—a country whose early systematic exclusion gave way to an America that gradually, imperfectly, began including people who had been kept out. That inclusion created backlash from those who preferred the exclusion, but calling that backlash "traditional values" doesn't make it morally legitimate.
"If someone's liberation upsets you, there is a good chance you were benefitting from their oppression."
“DEI is blatantly discriminatory.”
Whenever I read this, I sense someone angry that Jackie Robinson took Marv Throneberry’s place in Baseball’s Hall of Fame.
There’s mountains of evidence that we are still overlooking qualified applicants who aren’t White men.
I’ve been living under leftist culture for decades and I like it!
You're adorable
Wake the phuk up, bruh.
I want to know more about the "Leftist capture of culture"
Citing chickens for kfc, certain persons threw in with Trump. Alive one can fight fascism.