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‘Politics is Downstream of Culture’
The late great Andrew Breitbart said that, and he was absolutely right.
In America, there are two political parties — two parties capable of winning national elections. In local elections, the situation is more fluid and uncertain and party affiliation is less important but at the national level, there are Republicans and Democrats. Efforts to create a third viable party come at the expense of one of those, and essentially assure the victory of the other.
America appears equally divided politically, but it really isn’t. Our national elections are virtual ties because the culture skews strongly to the left. Absent the nearly universal leftward cant of news, entertainment, and education, America would be unambiguously to the right politically.
The culture, in turn, leans left not because Americans lean left, but rather because those institutions that for better or worse represent our cultural touchstones lean left: those institutions of news, entertainment, and education mentioned above.
Those institutions are out of touch with the public. How do we know that? We know that because they are terrified of the possibility that the cultural playing field might be leveled — as recent stories about a threatened shift toward free speech at Twitter reveal. People secure in their command of the culture wouldn’t be horrified by the thought that their ability to censor dissent might be compromised. That isn’t how secure people think. That isn’t how power thinks.
One institution that understands the cultural reality is The Babylon Bee. Another is The Daily Wire. Both of these get it. They know that the way to win the culture war is to speak to America around the filters of Google and Twitter and George Washington Middle School and MSNBC — and not to give a damn what those erstwhile guardians of the public information trust have to say.
Ricochet is doing its part as well, providing a platform for a growing number of right-of-center podcasts that appeal to normal Americans tired of the left’s strident and humorless and terrified talking heads.
We don’t have to “win back the culture.” We haven’t lost the culture. We’ve merely allowed a minority of counter-cultural nutjobs to cow us into silence.
The left is stupid: it dominates through intimidation and volume, rather than facts and substance. That’s why the left demands that contrary thoughts be censored. That’s weakness. That’s an implicit admission that they live in a fantasy world that can’t survive sober scrutiny.
I’m a man. If someone calls me a woman, I don’t care: I’m a man. And that’s the difference: I can’t be “misgendered” because my sexual identity isn’t a tenuous fiction. That’s the advantage we on the right have: truth.
Normal Americans know that. They know you shouldn’t talk about sex to six-year-olds. They know purple hair looks silly. They know boys can’t have babies.
Political reality is that there is a party on the left and a party on the right, and that they’re roughly equally balanced. Cultural reality is that the left acts in secret and requires censorship because it knows America doesn’t like what the left is pushing.
Our job is to speak up. So speak up. Use your own voice. Use your own name. Say the things the left wants you to think nice people don’t — can’t — say.
Give the real culture its voice. Be that voice. Say the things the left is afraid to hear. And offend people, if you have to.
Published in Culture
Let me clarify what I’m agreeing with concerning practical atheism.
Firstly, I don’t know the status of a man’s heart. But I have always acknowledged that there were people who don’t go to church because of deeply held Christian positions; and there are people who do go to church but it’s not for God, it’s maybe a fun thing to do, or an accepted thing to do, or the moral or the culturally expected thing to do.
Then there are cultural Christians. I know people who identify themselves as Christian because they live in a Christian country, but have no interest in and nothing to do with anything Christian.
And finally, I’ve met a lot of people who have a favorable view of Christianity but their only spiritual interest or passion, is necklaces, charms, amulets, pyramids, incantations, and scented candles; a vague spirituality, a live and let live nonchalance, an all-roads-lead-to-god religious view, and who essentially live as pagans.
My point with all this is that church going is not determinative about godliness, but neither is saying that they’re religious. In fact, in one poll I read about, something like 89% of people said they believe in god, but when asked to choose an answer from I believe, and not sure, and I’m undecided only like 79% now said they believe in god.
Yep, it’s not a black and white issue, with many shades of belief. I don’t always trust poll numbers from Muslim countries that show near 100% belief because it is often against the law to be an atheist, punishable by death!
Ah, practical piety.
It is good that claims about the supernatural are being more openly debated and that people can voice skepticism about Mohammed hearing the voice of the angel Gabriel in a cave in the 7th century without being stoned to death.
If after all of the discussion regarding the supernatural claims surrounding Mohammed, Jesus, Moses, Krishna, Zalmoxis and Thor, people remain unpersuaded, so be it.
If the shoe were on the other foot and someone was telling you that you can handle poisonous snakes and if one of them bites you, no harm will come to you if you have faith in Jesus, you aren’t a moral reprobate for telling that person he’s full of it.
Zalmoxis who?? That’s new on on me!