There Is No Such Thing as the "Culture War" Actually

Part I: The Left has gone bananas!

I spent the last week perusing the best of what my Substack feed hawk-tuah’d my way and was appalled by the fare on offer for the discerning political gourmand. Sure, some of the big-name political writers on the platform have good grammar and speak gooderer than average, but that’s about all the professional praise I can extend their way.

If you can squint past the Acadamese, how many articles have theses that basically boil down this:

How about that DEI stuff in them schools, eh folks? More like DIE, amiright!? *hyuk* *hyuk* You’ve heard me say it once, but I’ll say it again: the Left has truly gone bananas! Yes, yes, I know. Please clap.

What is even going on here?

How are people entertained by this?

Someone throw a pie or drop a racial slur, for Yahweh’s sake!

But these people take themselves too seriously for that, don’t they?

Luckily, if you get tired of the political commentary, we also have some top-notch metapolitics on offer here on Substack. Why, just last week, the topic of debate on the Notes system here was about Nietzsche and Christianity … yes, again.

Riveting stuff, folks.

Question: why do grown-age men here think that reading Nietzsche makes them smart or qualified to comment on politics? Intro to Philosophy was twenty years ago, fellas. We’re not on the quad anymore and that shit never got anyone laid anyway. No, it isn’t “Dark Triad” and no, you’re no barbarian laying waste to your enemies’ temples of worship and grabbing women by the back of the hair on the way to the goon cave. I was there on that same quad and I saw that you were all either the indolent spoiled brats of some scion killing time until you came into your inheritance or you’re literally just wasting your time with this “philosophy” nonsense, but thinking it makes you better than everyone else.

The discipline of Philosophy died a century ago though and for good reason.

It was a bizarre mutant birthed out of a Europe caught between Christian fundamentalism and Liberal secularism that had arisen as an ad hoc attempt to curb it. With these two non-grounded priors, nothing good could come of the philosophy project that resulted. And the only philosophy that survived or gained any traction was simply the kind that was conducive to the interests of powerful and wealthy forces. Just like Plato, the original philosopher, most philosophers ended up being nothing more than propagandists justifying the rule of their patrons. To want to philosophize means wanting to be a propagandist for someone’s agenda.

That is all that philosophy ever was.

The philosophers were the prototypes for today’s so-called “Culture Warriors”.

Besides, did you really need ol’ NEETshe to tell you that Christianity is retarded? Heck, me and every single scholar in the religious studies field for the last two centuries has been telling you that for years now. Or you could just study the text yourself — it’s only the most accessible book in the history of the world — and try reading the part that goes something like, “God let God be killed to atone for the sins that God/people committed against people/God to prevent God from destroying the world, temporarily, but God will do it later, actually as revenge for killing God or something,” with a straight face.

But no, apparently people need propagandists to tell them what they think that they think themselves, which, OK fine then. That being the case, where’s my Pulitzer or whatever it is that they give out to midwits who state the most obvious things? I’d settle for a Nobel, personally. Also, try reading another book, guys. I think Harry Potter might be more on your level, my dear N!(71.*5she fans.

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Anyway, my point for today is so simple that I actually have to write a lot of fluff to make it seem sufficiently stuffy and sophomoric for the sophistos of Substack to spend their time reading it. To those of you that have real jobs or who don’t run your mouths for a living, I can understand how this never-ending philosophizing can be weary and tiresome. I know this because I feel the same way, even though I’m now a member of the chattering classes myself, sadly.

As society literally falls apart at the seams all around us, the chatter seems to ooze in to fill the growing gaps and multiply like an infectious bacteria colony. We now have all this hemming and hawing and jawing about nonsense while the dwindling number of sane people left in our countries are wondering about, “what do we do to get out of this mess?” But there are never any real answers forthcoming, just more philosophizing about how “guys, have you noticed that the radical Left has gone bananas!?”

And this is by design.

This is because the philosophers and Culture Warriors are part of the system of control.

Finally, this is all because…

… there is actually no such thing as the “Culture War” really.

There is only propaganda, which is simply an extension of power.

Those with power make propaganda i.e., create culture to justify their rule. And, so-called Culture Warriors are simply propagandists hiding behind a self-serving euphemism. See, the problem isn’t the media; the problem are the people who control the media because of their monopoly on force and money. To change the culture, you don’t need to engage in debate or to “convince” the masses. This is actually putting the cart before the horse and exactly backwards thinking about the nature of power and its relationship to culture. To change the culture, you just have to bribe or bully the propagandists. From there, the culture that you desire can be created through a “Culture War”.

Thus, you first need money and power, and then you can change the culture by telling the philosophers what they’re allowed to say and think and tell the masses. And trust me, these nebbish, mewling little eggheads are very easy to buy or bully over to your side. For starters, most of them already share a disdain for the masses with the elite that they claim to be against. Yes, the peasants are indeed as revolting as they say, but that doesn’t mean that the propagandists themselves are any better.

But I digress.

Writing essays about the Radical Left and bananas is literally nothing more than a form of empty cargo-culting. And even as far as a cargo-cult goes, our brave Culture Warriors don’t even do that all too well.

What happens is that, like illiterate savages in loincloths, we peer through a chainlink fence at the actual power elite engaging in never-ending cultural struggle sessions whereby they write op-eds and pen essays in the NYT directed at one another. And so, the slightly clever ones amongst us begin to blindly ape them, thinking this is how politics works and that this is what it means to be a serious political player. In other words, us political illiterates are doing the equivalent of building wooden stick-planes without an engine in them and then acting surprised when they don’t fly.

Put simply: to have your essays on culture matter even the slightest, you need to be part of a power elite.

Or: you have to be hired to promote an opinion that a power elite with money and power already supports.

And, the corollary: if you do not hold the same opinion as powerful people, you will at best be ignored or at worst economically sanctioned and eventually imprisoned for your efforts.

And if we, as Culture Warriors, have a choice between being relevant by simply stating what the elites already believe and supporting their projects, or becoming irrelevant by refusing to, then who are we really fooling as to our role and what we really are?

Actually, you wouldn’t believe how many of my “fellow” Culture Warriors chide me for being too explicit in my writings about what I believe or rather who I believe to be in power and what their agenda is. They urge me to “play the game,” and be clever about my work. I’m making myself “irrelevant”, they say. And yes, they are right about that at least. However, they are deluding themselves when they claim to be outsmarting the elites or covertly resisting the system in some way. These people are doing nothing of the sort and both they and I know it.

And I wish they had the honesty to just admit, in private at least, that they took the 30 pieces of silver or that they’re auditioning for the role of propagandist for one faction of the elite or another instead of playing these games and lying to themselves (and far more importantly, to me).

It’s embarrassing for them, probably.

To know that someone sees through your self-righteous disguise because he used to wear the same outfit for many years himself. To know that you’re not dealing with a gullible peasant who is easily wow’d by internet pictures of bare-chested Vikings or lazer-eye edits on popular politician’s profile photos … don’t worry if you don’t know what I am referring to.

My point is that admitting that you are a propagandist being paid to fulfill the role of pied pier for people slightly dumber than you on the IQ ladder would at least be the marginally more honorable thing for these Culture Warriors to do. But bravery and honesty have always been in very short supply among our ilk. The Culture Warriors are by and large just as craven as the Social Justice Warriors that they claim to oppose. Both are just propagandists and secretly have more in common with one another than the people they are propagandizing to.

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Next, let’s dig a little bit deeper into the very concept of using propaganda fighting a “Culture War” to sway the masses against the power elite and why it is absurd.

In short, this is, once again, an entirely preposterous notion that reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of not only how power works, but also of how the masses actually operate.

Persuasion is a Function of Power (not the other way around)

You can’t convince 80+% of people of anything without having power and money first.

This is a truth that has been known by the Fringe Right and the Fringe Left for centuries now, by the way. Like, you can read Lenin’s correspondences with members of his own political movement where he tries to explain to the big-brained philosophers in his own ranks (read: useless bums and self-aggrandizing alcoholics) that their fancy ideas mean nothing, and that power has to be seized first for anyone to be convinced of anything written on those yellow-leaf pamphlets that they kept stashing under floorboards in St. Petersburg. Lenin actually faced several mutinies among his own ideological comrades because of his insufficient reverence for the sacred writings of Engles and Marx and his heretical views on the true nature of power.

Remember: Marx stated that the switch to Communism would be part of a gradual transition in society thanks to the Christian morality of the bourgeoisie making them “soy cuck queer pushovers” to quote the great thinker, and not achieved through violent vanguard revolution.

Lenin, to his credit, realized that this was “incel-cope” (his words, not mine) and that power politics doesn’t actually work that way.

And if you’re of a more right-leaning persuasion, you can simply read what William Luther Pierce (I disavow!) had to say about the nature of “lemmings” and how the masses of people simply listen to the dominant cultural, political, historical, religious narrative in their society by default. There’s even a handy meme explaining his stance on the topic:

Now, I disavow and morally condemn the people mentioned in the infographic and their views and any and all illegal and immoral activity. You guys know me and you know how much I value Morality Moses Values and the importance of upholding the Judeo-Christian paradigm to keep society stable and chugging along.

So the point I am making here is purely academic, FBI.

Wasting time on trying to reach the masses was concluded to be … well, a waste of time, by both the Right and the Left ages ago. What they chose to do next following that realization is well … *pulls nervously at collar* morally reprehensible, of course. But it did follow logically from their conclusions. You can see that, right? That’s why these people ended up doing what they did.

And now you know what has been known by clever people for a while now.

Bafflingly, to this day, there’s this weird narrative pushed that Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power through propaganda and ideological debates. I encounter this a lot among Culture Warriors on the Right (supposedly) of all places because of how much they admire Lenin and the Trotskyists who allegedly “marched through the institutions” and took over society that way.

This is such a historically illiterate view that I weep for the souls of anybody naive enough to believe such an obvious Soviet historical retcon.

Do they really believe that the masses rushed up to his train at Finlandskaya station, hats in hand, to welcome their great liberator too? Are they unaware that this image was the work of the Soviet propagandist Eisenstein, the great Culture Warrior, who retroactively portrayed Lenin as some kind of a peasant hetman or a slave-revolt Spartacus?

Imagine actually believing the propaganda of your supposed enemies.

Lenin actually arrived without much fanfare in St. Petersburg. He was still afraid of getting arrested at the time so he kept a low profile. Nobody even knew who he was, let alone supported him at the time. But he and Trotsky had money and foreign support enough to launch a coup soon enough, and that was what mattered in the end.

Still, it is very important that society maintain the illusion that power itself i.e., who holds actual, real power in their hands isn’t the true issue of all issues, and the various historical retcons that our propagandists cook up to explain the great events of the 20th century are proof of how hard they work to cover up the true nature of political power.

In the political present, we are told that some tertiary issues are worth all of our time and attention. Apparently it’s the heccin’ hillbilly Nazerinos with assault guns (bad) in some holler in Harlan, Kentucky that are the problem. Or, alternatively, it’s the crusty college kids swapping blowjobs for Instagram likes in college campus tent cities while protesting Israel that are the greatest threat to our way of life.

But those are arguments directed at society’s absolute cognitive dregs. By that I mean slack-jawed proles with the brainpans of stage-coach tilters. For the slightly clever ones, there is another another narrative trotted out: that it is the media that controls our society and that the war that we need to fight is a media war to take back the culture and thereby gain political power.

Again: this is a deliberate obfuscation of what is really going on.

But to understand that, perhaps a short history lesson is in order.

A Brief History of the Culture War (Abridged)

The aforementioned idea is not new. In actual fact, it is centuries old, perhaps even Perennial if we simply look past the term itself and the concept that is being explored in general. But we may as well start somewhere, so let’s wind the clocks back to the 19th century.

Bismark

The term “Culture War” comes from a translation of the German word Kulturkampf (Culture Struggle) and it refers to the political struggle between the Prussian Platonists against the Roman Catholics for control of Germany.

The Prussian government used propaganda in their war against the Catholic Church and largely succeeded in secularizing and de-Catholizing Germany by the end of the 19th century. The “Culture Warriors” were the state propagandists working for Otto von Bismark. Or, alternatively, they were also the Church propagandists working for the Vatican.

Subsequent Culture Warriors in 20th century America were predominantly Catholic and had no qualms about taking on the mantle of the old 19th century struggle. Similarly, they argued for religious censorship to be imposed on the state and private sector in the name of Moses Morality Values. Not all of it was bad, mind you. They tried to ban Hollywood smut and the porn industry, for example. But they never gained any political power and so were unable to successfully change anything.

This is the key point to remember as we go on.

Breitbart

Anyway, skipping ahead, how many times have you heard the line that, "the media controls America?” Or the line that “politics is downstream of culture”. These are staples and axioms of right-wing media and the populist zeitgeist nowadays. The latter quote probably came from the late Andrew Breitbart, a Mossad operative and diehard Zionist who believed that the Left had become too anti-Israel and that their control of the American media landscape was problematic for Likud’s political prospects in Israel.

He believed that the goal of waging this Culture War ought to be to get more staunchly pro-Israel Zionist hardliners elected to office. Although it was probably Steve Bannon who truly popularized the concept later as the head of Breitbart and then the head of Trump’s election team after Breitbart died and Bannon took up the cause after him.

Bannon

Bannon also emphasized the idea that the Culture War and the Trump phenomenon was about a struggle to overthrow the hegemony of the establishment Liberal media in America. Anyone who followed the events of the first Trump election campaign probably remembers what I am talking about and is nodding their head now as their memories are jogged along. Maybe you are even a veteran of the so-called “Meme Wars” of 2015-16 just the same as I am.

Bannon’s pitch was that the Right should be a Judeo-Christian Moralitarian coalition that spoke out against White Identity, anti-Zionism and the excess weakening of the American military-industrial complex (needed to fight wars in the Middle East). He also supported regime change in China and blamed the CPC for all of America’s woes, a talking point that a lot of American conservatives really resonated with and which will eventually be used to lead America into some kind of confrontation over Taiwan.

Bannon’s political platform wasn’t all that new or original though.

Buchanan

Before Breitbart though, we had Buchanan’s “Culture War” concept in the culture. At the time, so Americans needed a new war to wage. The Cold War had just ended and was soon to give way to the Culture War, and the opening salvos were already being fired in 1992. The cobbled together anti-Communist ideological coalition had come to be dominated by Trotskyists, who were anything but moral conservatives. As a non neo-con, Buchanan needed a new rallying principle for the American Right. He even converted to Catholicism to put distance between himself and the Zionists and Evangelical faction.

Buchanan eventually settled on a Christian morality platform, with economic protectionism and isolationist foreign policy thrown in for good measure. Trump’s later campaign borrowed from this platform, but even though Trump actually made it to office, he didn’t actually implement any of it upon gaining the presidency. I don’t think he even knew what his supposed political platform actually ever was.

The only thing that ever really motivated Trump were his own ratings.

Bush

Buchanan in turn hadn’t cooked up the concept in a vacuum. The idea of a coalition based on Moses Morality Values was tied up with the concept of the “Moral Majority” which Buchanan inherited as a talking point from Bush Sr, the first (openly) CIA-president in America.

Gentlemen and general layabouts, I give you the so-called Culture War in all its glory; a CIA President involved in the assassination of JFK pretending to be for Moralitarian values and whining about the Simpsons on National TV:

But the original Moral Majority movement itself was created in the late 70s by Jerry Falwell [fall guy, falls well?] and he became a very useful agent to the Deep State thanks to the seemingly grass roots nature of his organization and message.

See, we are talking about an era mired in the aftermath of a spook state coup that eliminated a sitting American president and brazenly instituted a Spookacracy on the country. This was followed by all sorts of bizarre, transgressive culture being shoved down normal people’s throats. But the important thing is that no one in the general public could tie the two phenomenon together — the link between the CIA coup and all the manifest cultural change happening all around them!

Sure, Falwell’s message of moral conservatism clashed with the elite-driven efforts to normalize homosexuality, licentiousness, feminism, brown people, and so on in society. But, it was also very easy to co-opt the movement and the moral outrage of Americans at the manifest changes being forced down their throats. For that, organizations like Falwell’s were crucial to keeping people in the dark. All that happened was that this rebellious energy was redirected from asking who in power was pushing these new cultural values, and instead oriented on endlessly complaining about these problems and offering exactly zero solutions.

On endlessly philosophizing about Moses Morality Values.

On never-ending moral crusades against an ephemeral opponent which was eventually understood to be the very idea of sin itself.

On worrying about excess masturbation practices among young men before marriage.

On a kind of Moralitarian “forever war” against an opponent that can never be defeated and yet during which no questions are allowed to be asked about the nature and goals of the war itself.

The masses were kept in a self-righteous lather the whole while, lashing out left and right at figures in the media that they misidentify as the source of the problem. Marlyn Manson, South Park, the Simpsons, etc.

And the only problem with morality scolding as an attempt to exert political power is that it simply doesn’t and hasn’t ever worked. Period. Never. But more on that in the next essay.

Buckley

Finally, because the Moralitarian movement was based on the principle of “muh Moses said so,” and nothing more rigorous than that, it was easy to redirect all the efforts of these counter-Culture Warriors into the elite-sponsored Zionism project eventually. That was the goal of Bill Buckley and his installment as the head watchdog of the mainstream American right by the spook state. He executed a purge of right-wingers with suspected nationalist leanings or who objected to the takeover of the American Right by ethnic neo-conservatives who had recently fled Spain, Germany and then the USSR.

If you doubt me, watch for yourself how Bill Buckley (gay, CIA) forced Falwell to publicly pledge allegiance to the real powers that be running America publicly on national television. I time-stamped the relevant bit. Take a gander, I think you’ll find it illuminating:

So, basically, the morality superman who tried to lead a kind of culture war against the elite-sponsored social-engineering agenda ended up bending the knee to the very people whom he was supposedly fighting. After all, who were the people pushing out and promoting the vile anti-civilizational culture that Falwell railed against?

He couldn’t not have nose-ticed the obvious culprits at the time.

But this brave Culture Warrior bit the bullet and sold his movement out to the Bushes, who were deeply unpopular and treated with suspicion at the time until Falwell and other morality men gave them the Judeo-Christian seal of morality approval. Notice this never-ending track record of Culture Warrior political failure despite the fact that America at the time was far more culturally conservative than it is now. And yet still the so-called Culture War failed to deliver any tangible political results!

Curious, no?

The Success of State-Backed “Culture War”

Let’s contrast the failed cultural campaigns with a successful one.

If we really want to trace the post-war cultural status quo somewhere, then Eisenhower is probably the best place to look. What happened under Eisenhower was a quick and seamless co-opting of Judeo-Christian institutions in American and the institution of a kind of subservient alliance to the dictates of the Spook State. If, prior to World War II, there was a grassroots Christian resistance to the state and the elite agenda, it was gone by the end of WWII and Eisenhower’s cultural program for America. In its place was a vague kind of civic nationalism mixed with Protestantism and the retconning of America’s history and the Founder’s vision to wash it all down the public’s throats.

As an aside, this development disgusted many American Nationalists at the time in particular and lead them to write-off Christianity entirely as a kind of albatross around America’s neck and embracing secularism as a result. Despite what the media would have you believe, most American Nationalists up until very recently were the complete opposite of religious nut-jobs like they’re portrayed in the media. And the same can be said of the nationalist tradition in Europe as well.

It was Eisenhower and his team of propagandists that laid the foundations of the modern Judeo-Christian anti-Communist Right as we recognize it for the next half a century and some. The Right was transformed from its regime-critical, anti-war, isolationist, even quasi-socialist self into a kind of ideological buffer against European-style nationalism or Stalin type Socialist-Nationalism emerging in America. This should make sense because the elites fear identity-based nationalism as an alternative system to their rule above all else and therefore promote various forms of cosmopolitanism like Christianity or Communism to the masses to counter the appeal.

Just to prove my general points on Eisenhower, I ran the relevant queries through the machine:

My point here is that there is a long and storied tradition of state-backed power that underpins the various successful “Culture Wars” movements from the Prussian anti-Catholics, to the Catholic missionaries themselves (the Black Fleet/Portugese+Spanish crowns), and then Lenin, Eisenhower and so on. None of these movements gained or exerted power through their ability to pwn their opponents at debate club. None have won power by managing to convince the lemming-masses of why their new system of virtue-ethics and non-aggression principle-based economics is worth overthrowing the ruling power elite over.

It is quite clear when contrasting successful and unsuccessful cultural efforts that the prerequisite of having actual money and power trumps any appeals to a non-existent moral high ground or appeals to the better nature of the lemming-masses.

Conclusion: Culture Warriors never won a single campaign using propaganda against an opponent with actual money and power. Worse, few have ever actually even tried. Most actually just serve the interests of one clique of oligarchs or another but do a good job of disguising it. Like most of my esteemed Western colleagues here on the ‘Stack, for example. They know who they are.

Why is this the case though?

Well, as we have discussed today, it is because:

• The masses listen to those with money and power, not to rag-tag cultural guerrilla warriors

• The elites either throttle, censor, punish or shut down propaganda that doesn’t promote their interests

• Thus, one must seize power and money first before one can change the culture of the country

• Or, one must work for one faction of the elites by justifying their ascent to power and the cultural changes that will come with it

Next time though, I will expand more on the whole “moral majority” phenomenon that we touched on today and why building any kind of movement on Moralitarianism is doomed to fail.

Why is this the case?

Well, because, again:

• You need to have power and money to dictate morality

• The power elites have always dictated morality in a given society

• SJWism is the new morality that our society follows because the elite say so, which means that …

• If you are not an SJW you are now part of the “immoral minority”, not any kind of moral majority

We will also discuss how “morality” in general is a literal fake concept that is conflated and confused with other, actually real concepts like self-control, or subservience, slavery and then see how this all relates to race, IQ and sex.

I was going to include all of this in today’s essay, but it just got to be too long.

See, I care about my readers and do what I can to make our time together pleasant and edifying. Sadly, my casual readers do not return the curtesy of caring about me in turn by refusing to financially support the blog.

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You should listen to that guilty voice needling you in your head and sign up now.