Elon Musk’s potential hostile takeover of Twitter is only one data point in a growing trend.
You likely haven’t noticed this, but there is an awful lot of evidence out there that the Left is beginning to lose the institutions they’ve spent the past couple of decades seizing control over.
Or maybe you have noticed it. If so, it could be that what’s going on with Elon Musk and Twitter might have provided the clue that got you started thinking about this.
There’s nothing left to rebel against and no one left to shock.
It’s been a strange time to be a freethinking rock fan. Counterculture legends Joni Mitchell and Neil Young — the very man who once taught us to “keep on rockin’ in the free world” — led the charge to deplatform comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan from Spotify for the capital crime of dissent. The two rockers made a decidedly unhip ultimatum: it’s either Rogan or us. Then — without a hint of irony — Young directed his fans to the streaming service of Amazon. Yes, that Amazon. The multinational company owned by the richest man on the planet that forces its drivers to urinate into plastic bottles.
We are, as a nation and as the West, too bogged down with our stuff. We need, urgently, to declutter. We need, as a civilisation, to get the big pebbles into our pint glass before we start filling it with sand. And next to refugees, fuel shortages and actual war, everything from trans swimmer Lia Thomas to the state of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s marriage is essentially powder and dust.
Naomi Wolf confronts the “forces of darkness” now battling for “the human soul.”
“It is time to start talking about spiritual combat again, I personally believe. Because I think that that is what we are in, and the forces of darkness are so big that we need help.”
That may sound like someone from EWTN or TBN but it’s Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, Misconceptions, and Vagina. Wolf once called UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, “a woman without a uterus,” though Wolf had no children at the time and Kirkpatrick had three. So Wolf’s brand of feminism is not exactly friendly to distinguished women of conservative inclinations. Recent events have brought about a radical change.
The long march of the cultural revolution has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams
I was recently on Steve Bannon’s show, The War Room, to talk about my book The Long March. It was first published in 2000, so you might think that it is steeped in the sepia tones of another age. Doubtless in some ways it is. But in essentials, I believe, we are living now with the fruits of ideas that were but tender shoots when I was writing that book. Its subtitle is “How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.” The 1960s! Aren’t we done with that silly decade yet? It was sixty, not twenty, years ago that Sgt Pepper taught the band to play. Haven’t we moved on?
The woke oppose freedom, the anti-woke champion it. There is no moral equivalence.
Amid all the rancour generated by today’s culture wars, there is an emerging consensus that the advocates of woke and its detractors are as bad as each other. As Vicky Bingham, the headteacher of South Hampstead High School in London, told The Times last week: ‘The woke-finder generals are as guilty of “cancel culture” as those they accuse of promoting it.’ While challenging the myth that all young people are ‘woke’, she also criticised the ‘free-speech brigade’ for persecuting those with woke views.
Soon after a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges against him, defense attorney Mark Richards took a swipe at his predecessors, telling reporters that their tactics — leaning into Rittenhouse’s portrayal as a rallying point for the right to carry weapons and defend oneself — were not his.
“I was hired by the two first lawyers. I’m not going to use their names,” Richards said Friday. “They wanted to use Kyle for a cause and something that I think was inappropriate — and I don’t represent causes. I represent clients.”
Monday felt like a tipping point in the social justice culture war raging across Silicon Valley’s social media apps.
One of the key purposes of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook is the control of celebrity influencers. The apps reinforce the message of the handlers of athletes and other celebrities.
When presidential candidate Joe Biden says, “You ain’t black” if you fail to vote for me, it’s the job of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to affirm that sentiment. Once the social media apps affirm the belief, multimillionaire celebrities know what positions they should take.
h/t @I_AmLarryDallas
What’s causing the current retromania?
Humanity, despite the prophecies of Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells, never mastered the technology of time travel. The art of it seems another matter. Our DeLoreans drive in one direction: reverse.
The ensuing Butterfly Effect alters the future rather than the past. We leave little in the way of cultural legacy as we continually mine our inheritance.
It’s no use pretending they’re a Right-wing fantasy
One of the most common tactics in public debate today is known as “bait and switch”: you believe you are being sold one thing, only for the deal to be changed behind your back and something else put in its place.
The Manchurian Candidate movie, based on a novel by Richard Condon, was once denounced by a British critic as a “cheaply paranoid fantasy.” Roger Ebert, reviewing the 1962 movie, acknowledged that it touched a chord despite being unrealistic…
Since George Floyd’s death, events seem to be spiraling out of control. For weeks, Americans were bombarded, almost on a daily basis, with reports of large protests in major cities, accompanied by rioting, looting, burning, assaults, and even murders.
Observing these events unfold, average U.S. citizens, watching TV from the purported safety of their home, might be bewildered by these transformative events, the purpose of which is nothing less than a “re-imagining” of America. To better understand exactly what is happening, let’s take a cue from my 21st Century Revolutionary Handbook. There are ten rules to explain what the radical left is planning.
The creep of the culture war into all areas of life is – to borrow a favourite woke phrase – exhausting.
Is gardening racist? That’s the question British culture war Twitter was pondering at the weekend, after BBC Countryfile presenter and ethnobotanist James Wong said that ‘UK gardening culture has racism baked into its DNA’.
Citing his own experiences in horticulture, Wong said requests for ‘wildflowers’ that are ‘more in keeping’ with a given area are ‘predicated on often unconscious ideas of what and who does and does not “belong” in the UK’.
It’s a full court press from the entertainment world. As more Americans than ever are relegated to their homes, the cultural revolutionaries are seizing the moment.
“Celebrity” is lately becoming more and more synonymous with “easily-offended hypocrite who lectures fans to find a sense of self-morality.” Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Harry shame us about climate change from private jets, while Harry Styles wears dresses to teach us about masculinity and Michelle Williams congratulates herself for killing her unborn child in the name of her career.
There’s an ongoing epidemic of selfishness in Tinseltown. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if more stars found something other than themselves to worship?
