Former South Carolina Governor and Republican Presidential Candidate Nikki Haley tweeted an invitation for Disney to “bring its 70,000+ jobs” to SC where the government is not so “sanctimonious” a Florida. Bill thinks she needs to figure out which side of the Culture War she is on, but that begs a bigger question: is there indeed a concerted full-court offensive against conservative values, or is this just the universal and timeless reaction of stodgy old codgers when confronted with inevitable change?
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56 replies on “Is There Really a Culture War?”
Bill’s closing argument is right on target. Thank you.
Bill’s closing arguments nailed it!
If Scot continues on his way of thinking, and many American do so, they will not only have to leave their church, but their country.
Politics is part of the culture, you can’t separate it. The left knows it very well.
Bullseye! Finally a talk about the central happening in the US…a philosophical infiltration of our country’s art and soul.
Re-writing our art, history and culture should be crime IMHO. Anti-American philosophy is as destructive as gunfire in schools and should be treated as public enemy number one.
In the last photo I saw of Nikki Haley she was wearing a Mother of the Bride dress which appeared to be all white, and she was clinging to the arm of her daughter’s stocky black new husband. It was cringe=worthy.
Go away Nikki.
I wonder if Ron DeSantis and his big money corporate donors agree that the Disney battle is a good fund raiser for his campaign. Why hide his travels from the We the People by RD writing an executive order to do so?
Sorry Scott, you’re wrong. Entertainment commenting on and inserting itself into politics is not an annoying fly buzzing around. It’s a dragon. A giant fire breathing dragon.
Entertainment is culture and someone once said that politics is downstream of that.
Scott sees that its a political and legal issue but 80% of the parents are sufficiently disconnected, indoctrinated or intimidated that they can’t see it. Those parents include doctors, lawyers, judges, and politicians. A political campaign without the cultural campaign with fall at the ballot box and the court. A cultural campaign without the political campaign will be misrepresented and legally sanctioned. Steve’s point of competing schools, media, companies is helpful but the parents that are indoctrinated will never hear about them or see them. Above all the underlying teachings: evolution and materialism with the result of relativist or subjective morality must be countered. All of this was predicted by creationist scholars 60 years ago. Its the natural consequence, and intended result of evolutionary teachings.
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I give credit to all for your valid points and observations. To describe it as a culture war has merit in that war exacts real casualties and this one has many.
The attempted “cultural appropriation” of great films wherein they are “reimagined” with woke messaging and lame stories has been a total flop. But the left is compelled to destroy what it cannot create.
Thank you guys for one of the better back and forth R/As. The civility is refreshing.
The point I need to make on this is that every aspect of our lives touches every other aspect. One of the best examples is that the idea of a clean separation between the church and the state is ludicrous. The only way to get all forms of religious belief out of government, would be to have no people in the government. Even atheism is categorized as a religious belief.
I am a Christian. There are basic, core, tenets to being a Christian. One of the most core level tenets is that once you become a Christian, you are supposed to deliberately change your life in any and all ways as to make you grow further from who you were, and closer to who Jesus is. People say, “God is love”. While that is true, He is also Righteous Wrath. You take all of God, or none of God. Jesus himself took the time to make a whip to use on the money changers in the temple. He went into the temple in Righteous Rage! From the stories I have read about it, when it says he turned over the tables of the money changers, those tables he turned over may have been up to 800 pounds! And He did make use of the whip.
The American form of government, down to the laws, was based on Christian laws from thousands of years ago. No morality can endure without a connection to the Authority that created it.
Our morality has been under siege for several decades now, possibly for more than a century. Rome fell due to the fall of their morality. We will be no different if we allow it to happen here. One thing the Bible is VERY clear on… there comes a time when the men of God need to do battle. In this case it may only be taking a stand against the corruption around us. Each of us needs to ask ourselves… are we too weak to handle this fight?
The pebble in the pond effect. And it is so true.
Nicky Haley is not going after Trump because she knows she can’t beat Trump. She thinks she might be able to beat Desantis so that’s who she is targeting. She’s shooting for the VP nomination, likely calculating that getting the VP under Trump would line her up for a successful run at POTUS in four years.
It’s a valid strategy. If Trump is elected and does well for the country, in sharp contrast to the disaster after disaster after disaster we’ve suffered under Potato Joe, then his VP whoever that might be has a good shot at winning. Because Trump will have served his two terms in a lifetime if the nation wants more of what Trump brings then his VP is the most direct route to the Oval Office.
Scott seems to be missing an important point. Whether he likes it or not, the culture war is NOW a relevant topic to politics. This is also one of the “things that change” that Scott talks about. The culture war is what got Glenn Youngkin elected Governor in a rabidly Blue State. The culture war is the Left’s Achilles Heel. It is a place where the Left is vulnerable in the extreme and the Bud LIght fiasco is proof positive that the culture war is not only relevant but critical.
Ignoring the culture war is what got us where we are now. It doesn’t matter if things should work a certain way, it matters that things do work in a certain way. The culture war is vital to the Conservative effort to win back this nation. It’s not an ancillary bug buzzing around on the periphery, it’s a vital aspect of branding that we on the Right need so badly but sadly manage to neglect almost completely. To our detriment. You can’t do all the other things Conservatives want if you don’t WIN.
People who don’t care particularly about traditional conservative values will get out and vote if they think their kids are being corrupted, which they are, or if they think their beer is turning the frogs gay …
There are several political problems with traditional Conservatism. One is exemplified by Scott. He wants to think that the battle is purely in the political arena but like Breitbart said — “Politics is downstream of culture”. The Left has zero restraint when it comes to using political means to affect the culture in the direction they want it to go. This is one of those things where we can and should use tactics similar to the Left. We are right in doing so.
Another is hidebound Conservatives that are willing to throw people like Scott Ott, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and Greg Gutfeld et. al. under the bus simply because they don’t stack up to that hidebound Conservative’s concept of ideological purity.
Conservatives have their own ‘cancel culture’ that is every bit as virulent as the cancel culture we see so obviously on the Left. The Left believes it’s doing the right thing as much as the Right believes it is.
People slagging on Scott Ott are wrong in doing so. You can disagree with Scott without trying to destroy him by calling him stupid things like “dangerous”, or “Poor old Scott” or any of that other nonsense. Scott is still going to vote Conservative no matter what. He’s on our side and he’s entitled to his opinions as much as you are. You don’t have to agree with Scott, I often do not. I don’t blast him for what he has to say either.
I want to hear what Scott Ott has to say and if I don’t like or agree with what he says I still like Scott and I still want to hear his opinions. Scott is on our side, he may not see things the way you or I do but he’s always a net gain for us no matter what.
Crawl up out of that angry hole you put yourself in because like I said, if we don’t win we can’t do diddly-squat. We want people that think like and agree with Scott to vote for our side TOO. Get over yourself.
Thank you for the astute comment ACTS (TM).
You’re welcome and thank you for saying so.
Great minds think alike. See my comment from earlier. Nikki wants to be VP, that simple.
Sorry, I generally don’t read very far down the comments before I post my own so I didn’t mean to plagiarize you.
But yeah, it seems so obvious to both of us that Nikki is shooting for VP that I’m a little surprised the guys didn’t see that, or if they did that they didn’t mention it. It’s a good strategy for a run at the office of POTUS. Especially in the current situation where Trump, if he wins, would be limited to a single term thereafter. Which makes it a four year strategy not an eight year strategy and well within the scope of Haley’s serviceable political lifetime.
That gets Nikki Haley on the road to the Oval Office even though she can’t beat Donald Trump in the coming election. If successful it would give her a leg up on all the other Republican candidates in 2028. It’s actually a pretty smart gambit. But it’s obvious as hell as you and I both pointed out.
I probably should have split that part off into a seperate post but I kind of wanted to use it as a hook to cover the other points I wanted to talk about …
For one thing, the opportunity for branding that the culture war is providing us. Bill’s said it many times before, we need the same sort of branding as the Left is using so effectively. The culture war is handing us that on a silver platter and we should seize it with both hands. It’s a proven strategy. The Left has proven it and when we used it on the Right it has worked well too.
We want to be the brand that stands up for parent’s rights to raise their kids as they see fit without indoctrination by the State. The brand that stands solidly against the immorality of Leftism in media*. The brand that is willing to wield political power to stop children from being mutilated chemically and physically. The brand that points out parents who do such things to their kids as virtue signalling Munchausen by proxy abominations not ‘heroes’. The brand that stands athwart real racism in all its forms. The brand that promotes individual liberty and accountability not State dictated social change. Etc.
Also the ongoing detrimental, diabolical vilification of our friends and allies on the conservative side of politics needs to stop. This crap of calling people vile names who are on our side and just happen to have a different idea about some particulars is lethal to our cause. We need to win FIRST, then we can hash out that sort of thing among us. Calling a fine, upstanding man like Scott Ott ‘dangerous’ is irresponsible and idiotic.
It’s OK to disagree, it’s not OK to vilify and demonize people on our side if we disagree with them. Ronnie Reagan spoke wisely when he invented The Eleventh Commandment. If it’s good enough for Ronnie it’s pretty much imperative to the rest of us. Some angry idiot of a keyboard warrior should learn from Reagan and if he doesn’t then he’s not really on our side. He’s on his own side.
That kind of thing is hurting our cause a LOT more than it is helping it. People that do that sort of thing are not real Conservatives because obviously they don’t understand that we have to win to wield power. They want everything their own way, which is pure, distilled, concentrated selfishness. They are sheep in wolves’ clothing and if there’s anyone at all we should be trying to cancel it is them. For sapping our strength in service to their own rage. They’ll still vote Conservative no matter what, telling them they’re wrong and to stop doing harm to our side notwithstanding.
*(My personal view of homosexuality and other deviance is that I’m not responsible for those people and whatever penalty their deviance brings to them is their own doing. I’m no more responsible for them than I am for any social deviance like criminality or other anti-social behavior. I don’t care if they are proportionately included in media productions, they are a very tiny minority.
I do care if they are glorified and heroicized in media because that does not reflect their actual role and impact on our society. That glorification and heroism is a form of militancy and should be tamped down hard. It’s as dangerous as making heroes out of Communists and dictators.
So while I’m not responsible for them, I am responsible for resisting the advocacy of their destructive lifestyles.)
Why invite Disney despite the wokeness? One of the biggest fails of society is shoving God to the curb and bowing and kneeling to the dollar.
Bill asking “If this happened in the Bible?” was answered appropriately by Scott. But discounting the relevance of school board meetings is strange given the reality of who manage to parlay the conflict into a governorship in Virginia.
Bill’s question sounds ridiculous until you realize that what sounds ridiculous today is mainstream tomorrow.
RE: Nikki Haley
This just confirms my initial reaction that her “running” for President was just raising her hand to the Donald – pick me for VP this time.
She is just demonstrating to him the she will be a good and loyal surrogate. The real tell is using the word “Sanctimonious”.
I am not saying she did this on instruction from PDT, just that she thinks it is a good way for her to show her VP bonafides. Also show DeSantis that it is not a one v one fight for the nomination.
As to the point of the episode. After 30+ years in one of those small towns, and being married to an elementary school teacher for that time; I can aver that any discussion, in church or bar or other about schools and teachers is looking at what is happening in other places. Very similar to the your congressman needs to be primaried, but my guy is ok.
Our church has a school board member, Superintendent of schools, HS principal, Jr High Principal and about 2 dozen teachers. There are a few “nut jobs” as teachers, and we had a rash of “coming out” about 5 years ago where it seemed 20% of the jrs and srs decided they were gay (and in one case trans) to the general accolades of their students. But that seems to have gone away. But if there were this cabal of teachers assisting the wokeness, we’d see it.
But, to me the way to combat this is with parenting; which in our case included church services.
Gov’t policy on not performing irreversilbe elective surgery or hormone changes on children, should be discussed. And it needs to be discussed in those terms. It is not anti-trans to say anyone under 18 should not be given hormones incompatible with their actual sex or have surgery.
Ron and Don and Nikki et al should not allow the term anti-trans or anti-lgbtqwerty to be used as it is a strawman of the highest order.
Oh, and just to add the only thing that seems to get any amount of traffic to the school board meeting is funding for building renovations.
The school board member that I attend church with did make a rather nice speech about not allowing the gay and trans pornographic books in the libraries at the schools, but they weren’t present so nobody seemed to notice.
Ask Parler how well the “if you don’t like it, make your own” worked out for them! Much easier said than done.
It doesn’t help when Big Tech colludes to shut you down
That’s the problem with that theory. Those in control will do anything to stay in control.
Having listened to this argument to its conclusion, I am finally convinced that Scott is a fool. A dangerous fool.
And no, I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of this remark.
@Mark Sanderford: I would disagree. I think that he is acting as a true believing Christian. That there is good in everybody and everything.That every storm cloud has a silver lining.
When we were first together, my wife viewed many things in that way. I have worn her down over the decades. She’s much my skeptical now. 8>)
Poor old Scott misses the point entirely, as usual. The most dangerous trait anyone who is involved at all in government, politics, and any aspect of life, is naivete. Scott is naive. People like Scott will allow the foundations of out culture to be eroded out from under us while downplaying the significance of the destruction – calling our resistance to it as “nostalgia!”
Scott seems to like culture and politics separated into nice, neat little boxes. The assumption that politics should be a nice club, where “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” applies but all of the players at least don’t want to watch the world burn, is so outdated, it’s not even funny.
Scott would be well served to read a bit about the people who came up with Critical Theory, the philosophy behind CRT, Queer Theory, Intersectional Theory and so many of the other issues we are seeing today. They have absolutely no problem using political power to enforce their ultimately Maoist worldview. Like Mao, they are subverting the children, then using them to control the adults into giving up political power and erasing the culture.
James Lindsay (https://newdiscourses.com/) and Helen Pluckrose have read through all of the foundational Critical Theory documents, broken down the philosophy, double-speak and jargon used so that it is easy to understand. Cynical Theories (or the more reader friendly Social (In)justice (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09J1H9WMN/
Jonathan, thanks for the links to the New Discourse web site and to the Lindsey/Pluckrose books. They have clearly put a LOT of effort into this over the last 4 or 5 years. I suspect there is a lot of repetition in their books covering the same basic areas, but they presumably follow the “primer” on Critical Theory that Bill has presented about the Frankfurt School and Columbia Univ., etc. on one of his past videos.
Looks like a good resource to have at our disposal if/when needed.
Bible changes over the years? Scott has apparently only scratched the surface in his exposure. Besides somewhat normal scholarly revisions provided over the years, such as:
Bart D. Ehrman: Forged: why the Bible’s authors are not who you thought they are
Bart D. Ehrman: Misquoting Jesus: the story behind who changed the Bible and why
Bart D. Ehrman: Jesus, Interrupted: revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible (and why we don’t know about them)
Bart D. Erhman: Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
Richard Carrier, D.M. Murdock, Earl Doherty, René Salm, David Fitzgerald, Frank R. Zindler (Editor), Robert M. Price (Editor) & 2 more: Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation of Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?
We also now have some even more radical historical reinterpretations:
Joseph Atwill: Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus: Flavian Signature Edition [2011]
James S Valliant & Warren Fahy: Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity [2018]
Robert M. Price: The Gospels Behind the Gospels [2023]
Richard C. Miller: Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (Routledge Studies in Religion 1st Edition [2017; expensive @ $60, but the reviewers’ comments supply enough intrigue that I may still want to buy it.]
I grew up Catholic and after a period of searching, my wife and settled on Baptist church, not one associated with the SBC.
That was my first introduction that there were many translations. And they vary widely, not just in grammar, but important word choice that lends context.
Then there are interpretations of translations, to make things more “accessible” (I guess that is supposed to mean easier to read, but many seem to be just a dumbed down reading level).
My Bible App has about a dozen different version in it.
We spent a few days over this last Christmas at Hilton Head, SC, and it was not warm – as in 26 degrees F.
And on our periodic trips North, we keep wondering why is I-95 6 lanes in FL and GA, but only 4 lanes in SC? Same for parts of I-26, although that is being improved. Not enough political pull or ???
There would have to be substantial infrastructure investment to bring 2023 SC up to the tourist population handling capability of 2023 Orlando and central FL. [But it is nice the tourists help to pay for a lot of it.]
Several decades ago we did have a freeze in central FL, and our power went out for a time, so we went to Epcot, where we saw that the landscaping staff had already removed the damaged frozen greenery, leaving blank black dirt, but nicer looking than shriveled plantings. Back then Disney was wide awake as to what was necessary for their customers.
Nikki Haley is like Dan Crenshaw, another WEF red diaper baby. They start off doing a nice job of articulating Conservative principles, and at the opportune moment they show their true colors. Ramaswamy has WEF on his resume too – expect him to follow suit
Yeah, with a name like “Ramaswamy” he doesn’t have a serious shot at the Presidency no matter what else he might have going for him or not. I’m not being a racist in saying that, I’m being a realist. A name like “Haley” … maybe. A name like “Ramaswamy” absolutely not.
I’ve heard hims speak (on the internet of course) and he’s not a Conservative, he’s a Ramaswamian. I wouldn’t vote for the guy unless he was the lesser choice to two very evil evils.
After Obamacare I swore I’d never vote for a Democrat again (I had crossed the aisle a few years earlier on some local issues), but after watching the GOPe for the last few years I’m almost ready to vote Democrat over a RINO. At least the Dem has the integrity to tell me to my face how much xi despises me. The RINO will only let it slip in a heat of the moment outburst, like Eyepatch McCain calling the Normals in congress terrorists.
Until recently, I consistently voted for one Democrat for county auditor. Did his job with no politics.
Then it happened.
He attended a Trump rally and spoke well about it.
Democratic party has dumped him.
Not running as Republican or independent. Pretty old, so probably retired.
Validated my trust in him.
Wish more Democrats were like him.
They seem to forget that PDT was a democrat in NYC until 2015. But he committed the high crime of foiling a Clinton.
When you consider the apostasy of Trump from the perspective of Leftism as a religion … They’re about on a par with Iran as far as punishing those who fall away from the faith.
Shades of Andrew Klavan, Leftism is a Religion to them. But their Commandments seem to only consist of Do whatever it takes to be in charge and Do unto others before they can do unto you.
Funny how the smartest and most virtuous among us had no idea that Donald Trump was a racist until the moment they were told he was their new Emmanuel Goldstein.
That’s the problem – the Dems have gotten dragged so far left by the radicals thet the good ones have been driven out. When stating basic science like “someone who has a d*** is a man” has become hate speech, it’s not us that changed, nor has the center shifted
Which videos or podcasts of Vivek have you seen? I saw a couple and on several positions he sounded positively Trumpian. Especially illegal immigration / border security. His description of the issues from illegal drugs to human trafficking were spot on from a language standpoint.
Hearing him talk about why NOT to bail out the two banks was also pretty good along with reining in spending.
I’d like to hear some of the stuff Conservatives would not like.
I will say that after working with a bunch of natives of India for over a decade, the inherent class system is definitely a concern of mine.
To be quite frank about it, I watch a lot of stuff and I can’t remember right off hand exactly which stuff said what things about whom. My opinion percolates down through all that and drips into my brain. Now that you’ve asked, I’ll pay attention so we can discuss this in details we can both use.
In the meanwhile …
My impression of Ramaswamy was that he was saying things that were unworkable as policy and he was saying them only to make himself look good. He didn’t pass the smell test for me.
I could be wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time. I don’t think he’s got a shot and what really worries me about ambitious wannabe dark horses like him is the Ross Perot Syndrome.
Because if it were not for Ross Perot then William Jefferson Clinton would never have been elected. The series of disasters that have followed are rightly laid squarely on Ross Perot’s shoulders. And on the shoulders of those who voted for Perot.
Like Ramaswamy, Perot sounded great. His policies were actually very good from a Conservative standpoint. He was standing for office in opposition to a sitting Republican President. He split the conservative vote. Die hard Republicans still voted for G.H.W Bush but many people who were disgusted with the RINOic trend in the Republican Party voted for Perot.
I did not, having the sagacity to see what was coming I tried to convince everyone I could not to vote for Perot. As it turned out I was completely right. Perot siphoned off 19% of the popular vote. That’s a LOT, the most ever received by a third party candidate. It wasn’t even close to enough votes to win. It was never going to be close enough to win. Nearly every single one of those votes would have gone for Bush and Bush would have won by a landslide were it not for Perot and his converts.
Perot had no chance of winning because he could not pull the Republican Base away from their party. Perot was actually the better choice but being the better choice is not the only factor in winning the White House.
This is something people need to bear in mind when listening to a candidate that is saying everything they want to hear. Even if he’s totally sincere and would do everything he says he will, he still has to be electable. If he’s not electable then there’s the potential for him to be a disastrous liability.
The same goes for Ramaswamy, he may be the better choice but he is unelectable even so. The Republican Party is not going to nominate him. If they do I’ll vote for him but they won’t.
Ramaswamy has no chance of winning because he will not get the nomination. He won’t get the nomination because he has no hope of pulling the base away from the Republican Party.
Sometimes the Republican Party can be a serious dogpile of idiocy. It’s still preferable to the dogpile of destruction that is the Democrat Left. That doesn’t make it any less idiotic. I’m a Conservative but I do not call myself a Republican thereby.
I do not see where Ramaswamy’s run for POTUS yields any material benefit. He could conceivably influence the Party for the good then gracefully bow out and throw his support behind the actual nominee. That’s about all the significant good he can do. Which means his run is mostly a waste of time and money.
Worse yet, if Ramaswamy gains enough popularity to make it to the primaries, when he doesn’t get the nomination a lot of his supporters will refuse to vote at all. If he doesn’t get the nomination then all the ‘wonderful’ policies he is advocating will be viewed as having been rejected by the Republican Party. Failing to get nominated then becomes an excuse to reject his better ideas because after all, the Party Members didn’t vote for him. It’s a Catch 22 closed negative feedback scenario.
If he pursues the Office of POTUS beyond that point then we have a Ross Perot Syndrome shaping up nicely and that would be a genuine disaster.
Ramaswamy should use the money, time and effort he’s using to run for the Presidency as a mechanism to pull the Republican Party in the right direction instead. If he does that, he can do some real good. If he doesn’t and depending on how he plays what cards he gets he can be a real disaster for America.
Ramaswamy should use the money, time and effort he’s using to run for the Presidency as a mechanism to pull the Republican Party in the right direction instead.
This!
It is one of the reasons I wish we had real debates. Another is that the Republican primaries should focus more on the policies that differentiate us from the Leftists and then discuss implementation of those policies.
What it ends up being is sniping each other down.
Also, one of the reasons Perot ran as a GDI was that the process to get the Rep nomination was essentially closed due to a sitting president. There was no debate of policy or process allowed.
The same is now happening on the Leftist side, no debate allowed, though likely for a different reason.
RFKjr should be allowed to help shape that parties policies. But he is not. Maybe the Koch brothers should sponsor him as an Independent and create a Perot effect.
I think a lot of the problem with getting real debates is the format, forum and moderators that are used now. Both (or all if multiple) candidates sides have to agree to questions that will be addressed. So of course they’re not going to agree to something that makes them look bad or an area where they are weak.
Where that doesn’t hold true and no questions are exposed beforehand the moderators can ambush a candidate that they don’t like. This does not serve the public interest at all.
Because of these and other reasons the who fiasco devolves into a sniping match.
Trump is good at that, it’s one of his major skills. That puts a candidate with a better message at a disadvantage. Stupid people prefer snarky zinger comebacks to substance and sadly there are a lot of stupid people that vote.
I’m talking about the primaries here, when it comes to a debate with the Democrat POTUS candidate the more snark and zing the better. The Democrat Left is composed largely of stupid people and that kind of thing has a material effect on them.
Perot might have had a chance if he’d waited one more election cycle, and if he hadn’t dropped out and then reentered the race the summer of ’92. He ran again the next cycle and got nearly zero support against Bill Clinton and the Clinton Political Machine.
A sitting president has a political gimme that can’t be ignored or denied. If the voting public liked him, like they did with Reagan, he’s a shoo-in. If not, he’s still the likely best chance his party has and if they run someone else it is tantamount to admitting running the sitting president was a mistake.
Thus besides all the other handicaps Perot never had a chance running against a sitting Republican POTUS. If he’d waited for the next cycle he might even have gotten the Republican nomination. Trump did it that way, Perot might have been able to pull the same trick. Of course …
“If ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts we’d all have a Merry Christmas.”
I think RFK Jr. is the last of the old guard Democrats. He’s still a Democrat and subject to the whims of the Democrat Left and I wouldn’t vote for him but … I’d feel a lot better about someone like him winning if that’s the way it has to be.
He’s got the name recognition and his Dad and Uncle were ten times the quality of men that the Democrat Left has fielded in the interim between when JFK was POTUS and now. Compared to the Clintons, the Kennedys are the last family that would have enough sway with the Democrats to make a serious difference. Which is probably why RFK Jr. won’t be allowed to do that. The Democrat Party has just gone too far Left and I don’t see them coming back to anything resembling reasonable.
I’m not saying I like RFK Jr. and I certainly wouldn’t vote for him. That said, if he managed to win and we were stuck with him, that wouldn’t be nearly as bad as Democrats have been in recent memory.
The problem there as I see it is that a lot of the reasonable, patriotic policies RFK Jr. would implement would sound an awful lot like the Republican Platform. That might pull the Democrat Party back to something less than totally destructive to the American Way of Life but that’s why he can’t be allowed to win too. He’d have to buck his party the whole way.
I addition to my last comment, I’d like to ask … is Nikki offering Disney the same sweet special treatment deal Ron is revoking in Florida? Because if not … this is ALL symbolic.
Well, considering she is not the Gov of SC any longer, she is actually offering nothing of substance. It is all symbolic.
PRECISELY!
So let’s see if I can get to the core of the argument here.
First, from my perspective, Ron’s going after exactly that. Disney inserted itself into the political world when it took a stand on woke curriculum in schools, and Ron said ok, if you’re going to do that then we revoke these ridiculous privileges we’ve extended for 50 years.
The LEFT … has come in and framed it as Ron vs Mickey, when Mickey has nothing to do with it. But that’s what they do. They misrepresent stuff. They motte and bailey all the time.
Now, it SOUNDS like Scott would be happier if that’s ALL Ron would talk about. “You inserted yourself into political policy making, that makes you a political organization, no more special privileges for you” and not wander outside of that. Fair enough. I haven’t been paying enough attention to that to know if Ron’s stepped outside of those boundaries, and I would warn him against being goaded into doing just that by Disney and the Left, because what they’re doing is suckering you into fighting the battle on their turf under their terms.
I take Bill’s point to heart, too, because it is absolutely analogous to the Bible on the cultural level. (I said analogous, not the same thing for those of you getting riled up at the comparison). It is the stories, the lexicon, common cultural glue — and it HAS been infiltrated and it IS being used ON PURPOSE to destroy that culture. There is no question about that. If you doubt it, go read the history of Critical Theory. That’s what they’re doing and they finally have enough head of steam to do some serious damage.
As far as “dying brand”, ok, fine (though I’m not sure it is destined to die – I think they are willing to temporarily lose lots of capital because they think they are doing the “right” thing and will come out smelling like roses in the end). For the sake of argument, let’s say it is going to die.
It’s still a behemoth, and it has enough momentum to take out your house and your house is in its path.
So you don’t just say “dying brand” and ignore it. You do have to fight back, and you do have to point out where it’s gone off the rails — with your family and friends and co-workers. Because if you want to save the culture, don’t look to our “leaders” to do it. Culture happens down here. Our leaders can help if we pick the right ones, but they can’t do it if it isn’t already happening down here on the horizontal level.
They’re not just intruding … and they don’t just SEEM to be the aggressors. They are trying to dismantle the culture at the root, and their intellectual writings come out and say this and it’s been there, and has been building for 100 years.
Niki’s trying to differentiate herself from Ron in a presidential run. Pretty sure that’s all. She chose this. Disappointing.
Oh no, no no, it’s not a culture war, the left is just conducting a culture “special operation”, it’s only a culture war when the right is fighting back. 😉
I have to take issue with Scott’s characterisation of this as unimportant. You can argue that the culture is MORE important that the politics. The culture shapes the minds of the next generation of lawyers, civil servants, managers, etc. etc. They then go on the shape our world, this is exactly what Andrew Breitbart was talking about.
DeSantis has every right to rescind a deal done decades ago because Disney was thought to be a “good thing”. As Scott rightly says, Disney have changed a lot since that deal was done. They have the right to make whatever content they like, but the State of Florida is not obliged to continue effectively subsidising them. It won’t worry her of course, I’m a Brit with no vote in Republican primaries, but Nikki Haley’s lost my respect over this.
I wish I had the time and resources to research the ideological genealogy of the long march of Marxist thought through our institutions and culture. Who studied under which professors and what they went on to do. A handful of devoted Marxist university lecturers in mid 20th century could be influencing thousands now that were born long after the lecturers died.
Ceding the culture war is what got us to this point. Having a population that’s willing to accept child mutilation and normalizing child rape is how we have a government that has all but declared war on half of the country
As much as I love Scott, I have to side with Bill on this one. As Bill has often quoted, politics is downstream from culture. Every once in a while the downstream needs to protest the pollution that’s coming down the river! I have personally never been that huge a Disney fan, but when staffers at Disney World discuss, in in-house conferences, pushing an LGBTQ&&& agenda. brakes need to be applied in every way possible.
I grew up with Disney, and while I get that times change what The radical Left has done to Disney is disgusting. Disney was Americana and a showcase of love for this country. Now it’s a slowly dirtying shell infected with Leftist rot
Rapidly not slowly, imo.
Yeah. As the phrase goes, “First slowly, then suddenly”