By Victor Davis Hanson, JWR 1.6.23
Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst.
How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?
They don’t see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues.
Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.
They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.
Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.
In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.
Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.
How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?
Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them.
They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.
They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.
Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.
They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.
The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.
So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.
Yet suddenly they realize their apathy allowed the country to descend into something the nation’s founders never imagined or intended, and antithetical to what most knew as America just a couple of decades ago.
So conservatives are awakening from their slumber. And they are discovering that they too can boycott, agitate — and roar.
The woke Target corporation in just a few days has suffered a more than $10 billion loss in its stock value. Millions of shoppers shunned its 2,000 stores after the chain showcased its “pride” apparel. The displays featured “tuck pieces” — veritable codpieces — that are intended to facilitate “women’s” male genitalia.
Anheuser-Busch came up with the bright idea that it would highlight Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender performance activist, to hawk its Bud Light brand. But beer seemed incidental to the self-absorbed Mulvaney’s fixation on promoting transgenderism. So Bud Light-drinking, red-state America got turned off by Mulvaney’s in-your-face-advocacy.
An ensuing informal boycott cost the company nearly $16 billion in lost stock value. Hundreds of millions of dollars of unsellable light beer stagnated. Stores can’t even give it away. Meanwhile, Bud Light’s competitors coped with meeting record Memorial Day consumer demand.
Ditto the defiantly woke Disney Corporation.
The now politically activist entertainment corporation insisted on pushing woke agendas down the throats of its family-centered audience.
The result? Its online entertainment services are bleeding millions of subscribers. Disney stock has lost $16 billion in value. Its overpriced theme parks no longer count on continual increased attendance.
Sometimes traditionalists prefer simply to drop out rather than boycott wokeism. One result is that the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards now have a fraction of their previous televised audience.
In 1998 — when the United States had a population of 275 million — the NBA finals earned on average 29 million television viewers. This year the NBA bragged its finals averaged a pathetic 4 million viewers in a contemporary America of 335 million.
The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team reinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — a self-identified performance art “queer” group — to headline the team’s “pride night.”
The all-male “sisters” usually put on anti-Catholic pornographic skits that mock Jesus Christ and sexualize Christian rituals.
That Dodger indulgence is not going over well with its fan base, especially the city’s millions of Catholic Latinos.
The woke Left still enjoys enormous advantages over the Right. The bicoastal elite has far more money, controls all the major American institutions, and dominates the dissemination of knowledge through the media and Silicon Valley.
But the Left does not enjoy majority public support. And now it has managed the impossible — to goad the normally comatose conservative dragon to awaken.
And it is just starting to breathe fire.
If only Victor would include just one sentence, or even a clause, reflecting upon the election fraud, I would be much obliged. Furthermore, the disparaging manner in which he mischaracterized the Jan 6 distraction to the Nov 3 insurrection, further expands a divide between Victor and an honest report when discussing the impairments of conservatives.
Trump’s inability to tame the swamp til the hour of his departure with the untested Schedule F provided the opportunity for the deployment of the Uniparty’s current corruption of America’s society, culture and policy. The internationally crafted work product of election fraud provided the means to exploit this opportunity. The International Liberal Order’s desire of a globalist new world order was the motivation which sprang the Covid trap which made everything we are experiencing today possible, but it also made it necessary.
In all truth and fairness, I quite agree with Raphael that there were simply too few of us to beat a system which is designed to overwhelm our numbers, no matter how large our numbers might actually become. I would further argue that the world is a changing, but not all the changes are moving towards a point of despair. The removal of ERIC, an absolutely necessary linchpin to the fraud conducted in 2020 and 2022, among many states already will greatly tip the scales against the machine algorithms, but this does not remedy the systemic and systematic traditional fraud which permeates the election process, nor the lock which the Uniparty holds over the injudicious rulings of the US judiciary. And yet, ERIC is not the only relevant point of change we are likely to witness in the coming months. Thanks to Kari Lake, in large part, we know a great deal more than we previously knew, and that knowledge is now being exported to many Lefty liberals who, despite their lack of legitimate rational thoughts on nearly every other subject, are not comfortable with such clear and obvious fraud as has been lately exposed – albeit this is far from being a dominant portion of the Left.
In any event, those who prefer an honest election are growing in number, and should the US election process ever be repaired in any way, the people will once again rule in accord with the principle of consent of the governed, and much of the existing illegality and accepted corruption will be possible to reverse. What will likely never be reversed, or not in any of our lifetimes in any event, is the good opinion of what the US once was revered to represent. Trust has been badly broken, and such fundamental abuse of any relationship will always have an extensive and extended effect. The sooner the US puts the mutineers in the brig, the less devastating will be the consequence of this effect.
In any event, I completely disagree with Victor that conservative apathy is the cause for the fall of the Republic, as it were, and for a fundamentally obvious and reasonable basis as I have described here.
I hate these kinds of articles, even from such astute and articulate commentators as VD Hanson, which lay the blame for America’s demise at the feet of the “comatose conservative masses”. This is simply not true, and it does no good to keep repeating this fallacy.
The truth of the matter is, that conservatives, or “traditionalists” as he calls us, are not, nor have we ever been, blind, deaf or asleep. By the time that it became apparent that our culture was under concerted attack, we had been rendered powerless to stop it. I can assure anyone, that we were not unaware.
The reason that we have descended to this sad state is because the Left had been quietly working for decades to infiltrate the foundational institutions of our society: the courts, the media, entertainment, academia, and above all, the administrative state. The Left, is well organized and well funded. They undertook to subvert and hi-jack our entire society, with the explicit intention of destroying America as a democratic nation, and if possible, western culture as a whole. That’s an objective that a certain 1930’s European political party would be proud of. Alas, their success is nearly complete.
Their minions laid low until they they were ready to make their play for total dominance. It was a deliberate, sneak-attack, so to speak. By the time that the woke agenda made itself fully known, there was literally no way that traditionalists could fight against it. The deck has been stacked. We can’t even rely on our electoral system anymore to effect change.
We have been conquered as surely as if an enemy had landed on our beaches, or parachuted into our cities, or crossed our borders en masse. Whoops! I guess our borders ARE being besieged, even as we speak. My point is made. Now, the ONLY weapon we have left at our disposal, to defend our country and our culture, is to boycott stores, products, TV shows, or sporting events. That’s pathetic!
So, we conservatives, (or traditionalists, if you prefer), should not be shamed for the deliberate, subversive take-over of America. Instead, we need to figure out innovative ways to take America back, by peaceful means. I think it can be done. But if that fails, there are alternatives.