Did We Win The Cultural War?

Rudyard Lynch of Whatifalthist has a new video up in which he discusses many of the reasons that the Left has failed and why he thinks that the Left would rather burn it all down than lose. We are, he argues, in the quiet before the storm.

 VIDEO: "WTF is the Left Even Doing?"
Whatifalthist (56 min.)

One of the points raised in the video is that we--conservatives--have won the cultural wars. Lynch says this by comparing where we are headed versus when he was a teen: apparently when he considers the cultural war to have started. 

    I have to disagree with his take that we have won the culture war. As a member of Gen-X, I can't even remember when the culture war started because I was already part of a generation being brainwashed on "It's A Small World" and "This Land Is Your Land." The cultural wars were already a couple decades old by that point. It was not lost on me, as a senior in high school pouring over a book listing scholarships available to the college bound that, other than the scholarships for children of parents working for large companies, the vast majority of scholarships were for women and minorities.

    No, what we have with Trump's reelection was a victory in one battle after a long series of wins and losses, but mostly losses. Vox Day is not wrong when he criticizes the GOP by asking someone to name a single thing that the Republicans have successfully conserved. They couldn't even conserve separate bathrooms for girls.

    Trump's election was a perhaps a culmination of several years of growing discontent against the establishment.  In his article at Wired, entitled "The Anti-DEI Agenda Is Reprogramming America," Jason Parham cites extensively to comments by Vernā Myers concerning the shift from DEI among the major social media companies and Hollywood. Ignoring all the tripe she offers about how discrimination against whites is necessary for "equity," Myers makes an interesting revelation: that the backlash against DEI was already costing entertainment companies money resulting in DEI officers fleeing as early as mid-2023 as they saw the writing on the wall. 

    Myers left Netflix in 2023. The timing of her departure was, she says, coincidental. That June, several Black studio executives also exited top-level roles. The exodus included LaTondra Newton, chief diversity officer and senior vice president at Disney, Karen Horne, head of DEI efforts at Warner Bros. Discovery, and Jeanell English, executive VP of impact and inclusion at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, among others.

    The joint departures sent the rumor mill into overdrive. Almost all of the women oversaw DEI initiatives, and their exits suggested that maybe the entertainment industry—and America at large, some speculated—wasn’t exactly ready to commit to a shared vision of inclusion, both onscreen and off. Corporate power would only allow change to go so far.

    Myers says that wasn’t the whole story. “When people start going on about what was happening in Hollywood, somehow they're not paying attention to the fact that studios were losing money,” she adds. “And often DEI is a cost center.” Myers says all of that talk merged together. Some women were let go in response to DEI rollbacks. Others, like her, were already planning an exit. Still, Myers says, the problem is that DEI is seen as an ancillary resource—necessary only when it benefits the bottom line.

    But DEI is only part of a larger scam or grift. It was an excuse--albeit a powerful one--to justify the countless billions in "grants" flowing from the government into webs of NGOs and the well-connected. Just like "green energy" and "global warming". Just like "defending democracy". 

    But the war is not over. Just today, a federal district judge in Maryland ruled that it was unconstitutional for President Trump to shut down USAID.  And this is just one of the many lawsuits challenging Trump's orders concerning USAID.

    I, of course, cannot guess as to the judge's motivation, nor do I know what evidence was provided to the court. But the consequence of his actions, and the actions of other judges if allowed to stand, will be to reopen the spigots of money that we have learned were merely funneled to well-connected progressives and their pet projects, including the cultural war against traditional Americans. 

    What we face is a Gordian knot of laws and Deep State networks intended to frustrate any attempt to reform government. Until the knot is undone, the culture war will continue.