Tag: culture war

Go With The Flow

 

“Never bet against the side that’s having the most fun in a culture war.” – PDB

Politics is downstream from culture, said Andrew Breitbart, and he was 100% correct. Politics can try to dictate culture, but a counter-culture soon pops up and forms a resistance. This was true in Soviet Russia, it was true with the hippies in the 60’s and it’s true today. Thanks to crowdsourcing and multiple streaming platforms, everyone can watch what they want to watch, and support the artists who produce the content that they want to see. The deer now have guns, and we’re darn near everywhere. For example, I spent hours in my youth scouring the bins of Zia’s Record Exchange and Eastside Records, looking for rare import tracks from my favorite artists. Now pretty much everything is available on YouTube, Last.fm or other platforms. Animé, (or as I knew it, japanimation), was a rare thing indeed in my younger years. We’d spend $75 or more (in 19080’s money) to watch a poorly dubbed VHS copy of Nausicaä, now there are entire film festivals dedicated to Miyazaki’s works

On this special episode of 10 Blocks, Manhattan Institute fellow and City Journal contributing editor Charles Fain Lehman is joined by the Cato Institute’s Emily EkinsThe Spectator’s Ben Domenech, and National Review’s Nate Hochman to discuss the public-policy implications of cultural disputes.

Find the transcript of this conversation and more at City Journal.

Top 9 Disney Rebrands for Earning Back Parents’ Trust

 

Parents form an important part of Disney’s customer base. Who knew? Apparently not Disney. Having said that, I’m glad to see that the Happiest Place On Earth is doing its part to reassure parents that Disney is again all about wholesome family-friendly entertainment rather than whatever gender ideology happens to be in vogue at any given moment.

Below are nine of Disney’s latest attempts to restore trust. Is Disney still captive to the more wild-eyed elements within its ranks? You decide.

The Matterporn 

Contra Robert George

 

Madison’s Notes is a good podcast, and the latest episode is an interesting one — interesting not so much for its content, but for what it reveals about the conservative intellectual establishment. What it reveals is, of course, futility.

This particular episode is a recording of an event held in September and sponsored by Princeton University. The event, which featured back-to-back talks by Robert George and Ryan T. Anderson, was titled “The Baby and the Bathwater: Toward a Recovery of the American Idea” and was pitched as a rebuttal to the growing contingent of post-liberals on the right: the likes of Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen. The right shouldn’t throw aside the small-l liberal constitutional tradition, argue George and Anderson. We must “stay the course” and “keep the faith.”

Member Post

 

Summer days are slower times. People go on vacations and otherwise take breaks from many routines. People tire and move on from cable news to sports (go England!) and movies, which are slowly coming back. All good. There are exceptions, and our current culture war is one. Just ask Loudoun County, Virginia, parents. Or parents elsewhere. Preview Open

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We Are in a War for our Constitutional Republic in Every State

 

Red Green AZ Jump PointArizona is a swing state that has swung hard left in key offices and will likely go entirely woke if Arizonans do not fully mobilize the working class against the real upper class. We must do so in every state for the sake of ourselves, the rising generations, and our constitutional republic. We are late in the game, as the Arizona Department of Education has already shown.

Before you reflexively roll out the usual line about “conservative” and how “class” is a leftist concept, read this excerpt from “A Modest Proposal for Republicans,” then go read the whole article after this post.

Yeah, yeah, “class” sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you’re supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn’t a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You’re already doing class warfare, you’re just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words “class” and “classism”.

Love Thy Neighbor

 

It is when we have the most cause to hate and reject our neighbors that we most need to remember the command to love them. Yes, my fellow Christians, it is a command and not merely an invitation. Though no challenge could be so difficult to fulfill, it is the foundation rather than the pinnacle of Christian love. It is a challenge not reserved only for the holiest saints but rather put to every one of us. Our Lord and Creator doesn’t even stop there. “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

A philosophy professor and friend once caught me off guard by claiming that the Golden Rule is nothing special. Any person raised in a good home knows not to mistreat others as oneself doesn’t want to be abused.

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President Trump continues to take real steps to fulfill his promises and effectively counter-attack in the Culture War. Friday, September 25, he acted to protect the most vulnerable, newborn infants. If you remember from 2016, he had an electric moment in a debate with Hilary Clinton, where he spoke more forcefully against late-term “partial birth” […]

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Another Real Advance in the Culture War Counteroffensive

 

Scale justice TrumpPresident Trump just went from ordering the federal government not to peddle woke lies to leveraging existing law and policy to force all federal contractors to toe the same line. This means no more defense contractors putting their white male employees through reeducation sessions. For a moment, I was worried when I saw the title. Then I started reading and remembered why I voted for Donald J. Trump four years ago, and why I will be working to re-elect him this year. Read and enjoy, emphasis added.

Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping
LAW & JUSTICE Issued on: September 22, 2020

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act, 40 U.S.C. 101 et seq., and in order to promote economy and efficiency in Federal contracting, to promote unity in the Federal workforce, and to combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating, it is hereby ordered as follows:

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Over 200 rare and very valuable books that were stolen over three years ago, were recovered under a floor at a Romanian house in recent days. Some of these books included first editions by Sir Issac Newton and Galileo. They were stolen from a postal transit warehouse in West London en-route to a Las Vegas […]

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Ronald Reagan, Thomas Jefferson, Roy Moore … and the Culture Wars

 

The usual names that come up when a Conservative thinks about Cancel Culture or the Culture Wars in general: Saul Alinsky, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, etc.

My thoughts on Cancel Culture made some other names pop up in my head; Roy Moore, Ed Stack, Brett Kavanaugh, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Breitbart, Stanley Kurtz, Thomas Jefferson, Jared Polis, Michael Corleone, John Roberts, Heather Mac Donald, Ronald Reagan, Michael Lind, etc.

The Fairfax County School Curriculum, Cancel Culture, and Why You Should Care

 

I think conservatives are starting to understand – in practical terms – exactly what Andrew Breitbart was getting at when he said “Politics is downstream of culture.”

“Cancel Culture” is the direct result of the Right’s elite class turning up its collective nose at the culture fight. Cultural battles, they sniffed, were a “distraction” from the “real issues” … like reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax.

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Looking around our country today you maybe asking yourself what the hell is happening to my country? For some of us who have been aware and tracked our major institutions malfeasance for the last 5 years and beyond for older conservatives. This is enraging, but not necessarily surprising. Politicians from the national and local scene […]

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Either Poles are too dumb to understand what’s ridiculous about a pornographic butter-churning contest, or they’re not. I’d bet they’re not, and they know a parody of eroticism when they see it. Too bad The Imaginative Conservative doesn’t. Apparently, there’s at least one writer out there lacking the imagination to recognize a parody when he […]

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Attorney General Barr Speaks up for Religious Liberty

 

AG BarrOn Friday, 12 October 2019, Attorney General Barr spoke at Notre Dame Law School. Notre Dame Law School advertises itself as America’s oldest Roman Catholic law school:

At the nation’s oldest Roman Catholic law school, students of diverse backgrounds are encouraged to broaden their social, spiritual, and personal lives while honing their intellectual and professional skills to serve the good of all.

Attorney General Barr took them seriously, and used the forum to deliver a call for defense of Christianity in the public square in the face of all-out attacks from militant secularists. I am pleased to see that the whole text of his remarks is posted on the Department of Justice website [emphasis added]:

Member Post

 

In her latest podcast, D.C. McAllister (@dcmcallister) speaks of her recent experiences on Twitter and calls for conservatives to carry on the fight in the culture war. Conservatives must never back down against the left’s relentless assault on marriage, the family, religion, and other traditional institutions that are the bedrock of America’s greatness. Preview Open

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In hearing about the latest outrage, with the young boys waiting for their bus after the March for Life in Washington, D.C., I had to look up another “new” word. Apparently, this is part of the process of hate that has permeated our culture in this modern world. Doxxing: (from dox, abbreviation of documents) or […]

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I co-host an alternative music radio show and podcast called Suburban Underground (it’s on all the podcast apps, FYI. Here’s the iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/suburban-underground/id1173099110?mt=2). My co-host (a former Ricochet member) and I have been thinking a lot about the accusations of cultural appropriation being lobbed from time to time at various artists, most hilariously at Bruno […]

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The Left Is Now an Honor/Shame Culture

 

Anecdotal evidence, especially from Twitter, suggests that the American Right and Left reacted to the Ford/Kavanaugh Senate hearings in the following three ways:

  1. Both tribes generally thought that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was believable and sympathetic. Most seemed to feel bad for her, even wishing that she didn’t have to expose herself in this way.
  2. The right essentially had the same response to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony. It made sense that he would be angry, but even more so, if he was innocent he should have been angry.
  3. The left universally seems to have found Kavanaugh’s testimony to not only be unsympathetic but on some level an indictment of him personally.

Basically Dr. Ford was met with near-universal empathy but Kavanaugh was a like a thermometer for partisanship. This outcome wasn’t terribly surprising to most conservatives. But does it have an explanation beyond tribal loyalties?