Politics is downstream from culture
Andrew Breitbart
We’re all familiar with Breitbart’s words, and Bill has long talked about the absolute need to re-take control, or least, establish some degree of balance, in our culture. He is entirely correct in this and it is every bit as true, although an even more uphill task, on this side of the Pond in dear old Blighty. I say “our” culture as the US and the UK, and the other nations of the Anglosphere, have their own cultures, but all are linked in many ways.
Winning office is all very well, but if the culture of the bureaucrats who implement your policies, and the journalists who report on them is against you, then you are trying to make water flow uphill. You can change the school curriculum how you please, but when the teachers themselves are steeped in cultural Marxism the lessons the children learn will not be the ones you prescribed.
There are signs that this message is bearing fruit at last. People who speak out are being supported, content is being produced. The Daily Wire has even released a movie, Run, Hide Fight. Over here Andrew Neil is launching GB News to counterbalance the overwhelming left tilt of broadcast news in the UK. Even the poor, sad old BBC seems dimly to be realising that the London boroughs of Camden and Islington are not typical of the UK and that relatively few people in Britain share their Woke attitudes. Like a dinosaur seeing a bright streak in the sky the BBC is lumbering for cover.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
I am often struck by how much I what see today is reflected in history. Education is the spring from which the cultural river flows, and various people have made conscious efforts to see that it flows in their direction for many years. We know about the Frankfurt School and Gramsci on the left, and bodies like Prager U and the Hoover Institute on the right, but this goes back further.
In London, in 1826, a group of radicals influenced by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham founded a university based in Gower Street to help propagate his ideas. At that time there were only two universities in England, Oxford, and Cambridge. The new university was called simply London University, today University College London (UCL).
Seeing what was being done, King George IV and the Duke of Wellington set up their own new university to counteract the factory for radicalism set up by the Benthamites. In 1829 King’s College London was established in The Strand, half a mile from UCL. A good friend of mine went to King’s, and the rivalry between the two colleges was still strong in the early ‘80s. It was common for a King’s man to refer to UCL as “the Godless College on Gower Street”.
Now, it should be said that many of Bentham’s notions are not terribly radical today. There were grave injustices at the time that needed to be (and have been) addressed. It is the genius of Marxism that it takes hold of genuine problems and then nurtures and feeds off them, but that’s off the point I’m making. It is a fact that King’s College London was an early attempt to set up a deliberately conservative institution of learning.
Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.
Rudyard Kipling
Considering its origins it is not surprising King’s has royal connections. From 1955 until his recent death Prince Philip held the courtesy title of Governor of the University. It is likewise not surprising that the University sent out an email after his death with a photo.
“As the nation marks the death of HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, we thought you might like to see this photo of the duke at the official opening of the Maughan Library in 2002, which some colleagues will remember.”
What should be surprising, but I’m sure you’ve already guessed it, is that the King’s has since apologised for the “harm” they caused by sending out the statement and photo. You can read the story for yourself.
An educational story indeed. The lesson being we can never let up. Establishing a TV channel, a college or what have you, is just planting a garden. If institutions are not tended and cared for like gardens the weeds will soon overcome and choke the flowers.