Culture is King

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags: Culture is King! Even When the Culture is Insane!

 

On November 17, 2024 Deborah C. Tyler published this piece, The Incurable TDS, saying with some outstanding verbiage:

We are living through an astonishing time in our nation’s political history.  Somewhat more than half of Americans see President Trump as a leader of courage, energy, and commitment with a proven record of promoting peace and strengthening both the U.S. economy and the southern border against an illegal invasion, whereas the other half sees only personal evil in Trump and describes him with adolescent hyperbole, habitually comparing him to Adolf Hitler.  That half is not able to thoughtfully assess Trump’s policies, or even its own economic or political interests.  

Instead, these people cling to a sense of moral superiority and are obsessed with the imputed personal sins of a man they despise...... this is not a free-standing mental disorder.  Rather, it is a delusional symptom cluster at the terminal stage of a sixty-year vast, progressively insane attempt by the left wing, especially the cultural, educational and political elites, to entrain the American people to despise their nation, their laws, and themselves in order to break their self-respect and mentally enslave them to government control.  Few people can stand against the indoctrination and brainwashing that they have been exposed to all their lives.......[Trump was] the man who challenged their beliefs..... (Editor's Note:  There's much more, and worth reading. RK)

I thought her use of the word entrain was a mistake but it means to put aboard a train, and that's what the left has been doing in America for almost 150 years, and they started by capturing public education.  After reading the article and then the comments I think it worthwhile to explain leftist/socialism in America didn't start out as an openly Marxist movement.

Socialism is foundationally atheistic, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that didn't fly in America, so they called themselves "progressives", and the driving force behind that was religion, what's now called the "progressive gospel", in effect claiming socialism was the practical application of the Christian ethic. 

They use our own values against us. Now everyone was to be everyone's bother and were responsible for each other and morally obligated to ___________fill in the blank, all of which would entail massive amounts of money confiscated from the American public and spent as they saw fit in order to expand government control over Americans lives.  Hence their need for the 16th Amendment, income tax, and the 17th Amendment ending how Senators were chosen by the states as de facto ambassadors to the central government, effectually overturning the 10th Amendment, the states rights amendment. With passage of the 17th Amendment, for all practical purposes, states rights ended. And finally the creation of the FED to take control of the currency out of the hands of Congress.  All done in 1913. 

After WWII the real powers behind this movement didn't need religion any longer and kicked them to the curb, and then the driving force was psychology. If you disagreed with what they were promoting, you were not only morally inadequate, you were insane, which is the same clabber they're promoting now.

So after almost 150 years of religious and social corruption condemning western civilization's moral and mental foundations it's a wonder we're now finally coming out of that miasma, and truth is coming to the fore.

Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality. Everything we're told has a historical foundation and context, and everything we're told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. If it doesn't, it's wrong, and all that's left to do is develop the intellectual response to explain why it's wrong. And that's what's finally happening as a result of the internet and the rise of the alternative media.  

Having the truth exposed is why the Democrat party is in a downward swirl of failure, academia is being seriously challenged, which will become more pronounced in the coming years, heretical religious leaders are being openly questioned and abandoned, Europe's socialist governments are broke and collapsing, and the Pravda media is and swirling down the drain.

Culture is King!

By Rich Kozlovich

 Today at American Thinker Avrohom Gordimer published this piece, Orthodox Jews and Trump, saying:

 

It is no secret that the Orthodox Jewish community, of which I am a part, is overwhelmingly supportive of President Trump for reelection. Although the numbers are even higher now, Trump enjoyed the support of 89% of the Orthodox Jewish community in the 2020 election. Of a rapidly-growing community of close to 1 million people, this says a ton.

 

Culture is king, and you can't reason people out of positions they've not be reasoned into, but you can "experience" people out of those positions, and the antisemitism that's inflaming the nation today is shocking, and I believe it has to even shock the secular Jews.   

 

There is an upside to all of this, especially the abusive, violent, and discriminatory behavior against Jewish students on America's college campus.  Those young, smart, and abused Jewish students are not going to be leftists, no matter what they're family's political culture may be.  They've been "experienced" out of those views.  A new culture in development.

 

And just because so many American Jews are now secularized and worship leftism, they'd better get this right in their heads. If these monsters take over, they won't care if they're secular or religious, the antisemites are going to lump them all together, just as the Nazis did, that's what leftists do, starting with the French Revolution.

That's history, and that history is incontestable. 

Then we have all this talk about how RFK, Jr. may drop out of the race and endorse Trump.  Well, if he does I wonder what he gets in return? If Trump just says thank you and walks away, then it's not a problem. If Kennedy gets anything in return, it's a problem. He's a Kennedy, he's a radical leftist, and did I mention he's a Kennedy. Oh, yeah I did, and so let me say it again. He's a Kennedy. Nuf Ced?

The truth is I doubt his endorsement would be all that helpful.  His voters are Democrats, they're left wing radicals, just like Kennedy, or they wouldn't be supporting him, so they're either going to vote for Kamala, or they simply won't vote.  

The "Republican" votes he was going to get would be from nitwits like Liz Chaney, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, etc. Just as Susan Collins is going to write in Nikki Haley in stead of voting for Trump, they weren't going to vote for Trump no matter what, they're already lost votes, and that number is small, and after this all plays out, that number will be even smaller, so, who cares?

Culture is king, and they're no longer part of the conservative culture, and will be shunned, except by the Pravda media who will trot them out for their views, even though no one really cares what they have to say. 

And finally, this idea that capitalism and conservatism are pages in the same book, they're not.  Since I write about everything that goes on in the world, I subscribe to a number of news sources, including geopolitical sites, and reading their views is so often a painful task, and I include those at the American Enterprise Institute, which these days I just scan rather than read as I can see the foolish direction they're going in so many of their commentaries, and find them hard to stomach.

I was an exterminator for 40 years and served for 25 of them of them as a officer or board member of a number of our industry trade associations, and I discovered believing that large corporations and manufacturers are conservative is a serious error in judgement, they're as slippery as a Tallyrand, or a Kissinger.

At best.... I found them to be leaky vessels as allies dealing with major legislation, including the Montreal Protocol, the Kyoto Accords, the Colony Collapse Disorder lies, etc.   

Calling them leaky vessels is being kind, since entirely too often they're views are simply self-serving and corrupt. They even corrupt the trade associations turning them into cats paws for big government activism and unwarranted abusive regulations, which goes back to FDR who utilized them - actually threatened them - to promote his unconstitutional National Recovery Act.

Can Our Politics Get Better, If Our Culture Keeps Getting Worse?

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

"Politics is downstream from culture" has long since passed from revelation to cliché. Culture has long since become politics and politics has become culture. All culture serves or pretends to serve political ends. And all politics, outside the nitty gritty of the actual legislative agenda, is culture.

Politics has come to be defined by social media influencers. Key cultural figures, like AOC, may have no meaningful legislative clout, but adapted social media celebrity to politics. That they don't really do anything is almost beside the point in a culture war where no one really does anything except build their brand by virtue signaling, trolling, and insulting their opponents. The base for politics has been sharply split between issue voters and culture voters with the former still dominating elections, but the latter dominating narratives. And social media narratives preclude the need for real world results.

The internet broke our culture the way that it broke our economy. But you can't really blame technology or even the consolidation of power by special interests using the future shock of the new on anything except the inherent weaknesses in the Weimar world of the pre-internet era that was all too vulnerable to them.

The underlying question on seeing every new low is whether the culture is making the politics worse, or the politics is making the culture worse. The answer to the chicken and egg question is that a narcissistic culture has produced a narcissistic politics. The jargon of contemporary politics that has been adopted so well by AOC leans heavily on "My truths", "My pain", and "I am outraged". Every issue is reduced to a narcissistic projection with no thought for anything larger except as a secondary narrative.

A narcissistic culture did not shed its principles and convictions overnight. It was a slow process that took us from the "Me" generation to the "Selfie" generation. And at the tail end of it, political narcissism shed even the faintest pretenses of Obama's "We are the ones" and asserted "self-care" and "safe spaces" as its highest values. The unapologetically narcissistic "My truths" dispensed with any interest in facts or truth. Principles had fallen by the wayside even earlier after being sacrificed on the altar of Hope and Change.

Can our politics get any better if our culture keeps getting worse?

It's a mistake to think of America as an immutable set of ideas built into its founding documents. The ideas and the documents were magnificent, but they were the product of a culture that believed in them. A document without conviction is just so much paper. And anything can be rewritten on that paper.

Cultural wars can't be fixed by voting and cultural problems can't be solved with elections. But we do "elect" cultures with our economic choices, our educational decisions, and our personal styles.

That doesn't mean that politics, that voting and fighting for issues don't matter. They very much do. It's just that the underlying crisis ensures diminishing returns. An army with the best equipment, but terrible morale, no unit cohesion, and no sense of larger purpose will lose every war that depends more on an enduring struggle than brief shows of force. As long as the Left controls the machinery of the culture, it has an inescapable advantage in setting the terms of the culture war. Even when it can't define our culture, it can deny us the advantages of our culture. And that may be its greatest weapon.

Imitating the Left's tactics, a popular approach, is a plan for a military, not a cultural victory. And without cultural victories, the larger struggle is doomed. From the beginning, the Left sought to eliminate cultural alternatives to its worldviews leaving its ideas and worldview as the only option. It successfully chipped away at the majority culture, fragmenting it, degrading it, and tearing it down until its culture had achieved institutional dominance. And until even its enemies had adopted core elements of its worldview while they still continued to believe that they were fighting the Left.

Envisioning conservatism as a counterculture is a popular meme, but the trouble with it is that the Left is so effective as a counterculture because of its narcissistic nihilism under which it believes in little except its emotional drives for power over others, for destruction, and for the worship of its ego.

A counterculture is inherently destructive. It contains nothing except the seeds of destruction. Its stylistic elements, its vigor and edginess, are all external. The counterculture is a zombie with no soul.

A conservative counterculture, which is emerging in some ways, is as much of a zombie. It's no coincidence that its loudest elements ridicule the idea of conserving anything or believing in anything except Nietzschean narcissism and power. It won't preserve anything or build anything new. Like its National Socialist counterparts, who sought to build a counterculture based on imitating the Communists, the end result can only be corruption and destruction.

Small numbers of people can build a culture. But the culture has to be a commitment to building a future rather than undoing the present. It has to be based on conviction and principles. A compelling culture can sweep across millions and transform the world. But the trick is that it has to have a soul.

Our politics can't get any better until our culture does. And our culture can't get any better until it stands for building a new future.

American culture was thoroughly corrupted because we turned it over to massive unaccountable institutions, to corporations, organizations, think tanks and the elites of financial capitals. They didn't believe in anything and that made it easy for the Left to take them over. Any culture that can resist the Left must believe in itself, and it must believe in a world that transcends the Left.

The counterculture defines itself by the culture. That's how you know it's a zombie. But a culture defines itself not by its opposition to something, but by what it intends to create for its children.

We had that culture once. We can have it again. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Bring in the Clowns, There Needs to be Clowns!

By Rich Kozlovich

The title to this piece is based on the song, Send in the Clowns.  Did you ever ask what that means?  '“Send in the Clowns,” is a metaphor for the moment in a play when things are falling apart and, to keep the audience diverted from the chaos, somebody tells a few jokes."   In the play that made this song popular the story was about the unhappy and painful chaos that can take place in peoples lives, and that fits with the story I'm trying to tell.  The difference is in the play, there were no clowns.  The story I'm telling is full of clowns.

On September 5, 1651 Oliver Cromwell's forces defeated the forces of Charles II.  Later as they were marching into London the crowds cheered vigorously, and one of his followers was enthralled with the cheering.  Cromwell put a reality damper on that saying: 

“Do not trust to the cheering, for those very persons would shout as much if you and I were going to be hanged.”

Around 25,000 cheering Bronx citizens attended a Trump rally, and it shocked Democrats, after all, this is New York, this can't be happening!  The governor of New York called them "a bunch of clowns", and the media insisted it doesn't mean anything. 

As my regular readers know I'm a real fan of American Thinker, which I consider one of the very best news sites in the nation.  On Saturday Monica Showalter, one of my favorite writers, posted this piece, What the Bronx voters who've flipped to Trump are saying, quoting one of the attendees:

Jerry Evans, a registered Democrat in New York City, had never attended a political rally before Thursday.  But speaking with Newsweek at Donald Trump's campaign event in the South Bronx, Evans said that he turned out to show support for the former president because he feels "very strongly about how the border's going."...... "You know, I said, why is Biden giving them the red carpet treatment?"...... "He's giving them everything—giving them housing, giving them shelter, giving them money, cash—and people who live here can't get that."

She went on to ask:

How many thousands of them in that 25,000 crowd are thinking the same thing?

No matter how many are thinking along those lines, here's what we need to ask.  Is this enlightenment permanent?   Answer: Nah, it isn't!  This is just a “my ox is bring gored” reaction. If their ox wasn’t being gored they’d be just fine with Biden and all the insanity and treason being promoted by the left.

It will be the same with secular Jews. If they vote for Trump over Biden’s abandonment of Israel and Trump wins, once Trump has dealt with that crisis, and their ox is no longer being gored, they’ll abandon Trump and the Republicans in a nanosecond.  They will revert to type, because culture is king, and leftism is part and parcel of the culture of secular Jews.

I'm reading about all this outrage over these antisemitic protests on America's college campuses, and the downward spiraling standards that's created a lack of adequate education, all very expensive mind you, from parents and donors.  And of course were expected to believe these were just unorganized spontaneous grass roots eruptions at 47 universities....at the same time.  And we're expected to think those declining standards to allow incompetent DEI students to graduate was all brand new.    

Well, I'm sorry, I just have to role my eyes and chuckle. All of a sudden they're outraged?  This insanity has been going on for decades and its wasn't obvious to them for all these decades?

These are really smart, successful, and intelligent people, and yet.... they're shocked...shocked I tell you....... just like Captain Renault, to find that corruption has been going on there. They're shocked academia has been corrupted with collapsing standards, to meet idiotic DEI demands.

They're shocked that academia is a cultural, intellectual, and morally corrupt mephitic ooze of inbreeding, being led by grossly overpaid, blatantly incompetent DEI racists, and leftist/Marxist/anti-American ideologues, many of whom are now being exposed as plagiarists, who have been turning out graduates who can't read, write, or have a working knowledge of history, geography, or how and why America is unique in all of world history, or are even competent in their fields of study.  And that it's been going on for decades.

UCLA is turning out medical students that are a disaster, all due to the admittance of low-performing students based on affirmative action preferences.  DEI admittees, which couldn't cut it, so that required lowering the standards across the board in order to graduate unaccomplished students.   Unqualified doctors who will soon be killing people because they're incompetent, and most likely weren't very smart or very motivated in the first place. 

 

Let's try and get this right once, just once, please.  Diversity without accomplishment is philosophy without form and incompetence without consequence.  And we're expected to believe they just now noticed all that? Now, I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!

Billionaires like Stephan Schwarzman all over the nation are claiming they're going to support Trump.  Wow!  That's great, right?  Let's try and get this right once, just once, please.  Billionaires are at best leaky vessels as allies, and would easily and quickly abandon Trump in the blink of an eye. Just like Schwarzman, they are not conservatives, and the only moral foundation they have is opportunistic.  “I’m in it for me, get used to it.... peasant”!  They would sell the nation and everyone in it for 12 pieces of silver.

One of the foundational truths I’ve discovered in my 78 years there is no Book of Fair, and what's fair is always predicated on “who’s ox is being gored”.  Right now Biden is goring the oxen of his entire base, and they don't think it's fair. But understand this, if Kennedy was the Democrat pick, they would vote for Kennedy in a heart beat, and just because he got a couple of things right, that doesn’t change the fact he’s just as radical as Biden. 

What should shock every conservative who supports traditional values is all this outrage, and all this discontent, will soon pass and they'll be right back to being part and parcel of the problem once again.  Leftism is a cultural mental disorder, predicated on greed, envy, lust, hate, violence, and self interest, from which most leftists cannot be cured, and culture is king!  

So, don't let the cheering fool you.  People without a solid moral foundation have meandering values that allow them to rationalize their reversion to acts of self interest and corruption.   Cromwell defeated a corrupt King in 1651, and then had to dissolve Parliament in 1653 for becoming corrupt for their own ends.  Here's one of my favorite quotes from Oliver Cromwell, that is totally applicable to our modern day state of corruption. 

“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!  

Do I hear a Second for that motion!