After the Revolution

Most Americans don’t seem to realize they’ve just lived through a cultural revolution. This goes for both Right and Left. Most on the Right don’t seem to realize how badly they’ve lost, and most of the Left don’t seem to understand what exactly it is that they’ve won.

It might be more accurate to say what just happened was the delayed second phase of the cultural revolution that took place in the 1960s, similar to how it’s more accurate to see the Second World War as the delayed second phase of the First World War. But this more recent action was still distinct. 2020 will be seen as a “fulcrum year” for a lot of reasons, but the cultural coup that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s death set a pretty clear Before and After. The Progressive Left finally took total control of the nation’s key institutions — Government, Media, Academia, Corporate Business, even the military. Newspapers and universities purged themselves of those not with the program, including bewildered old liberals a bit behind on their ideological updates. Christianity disappeared as an assumed nexus of American culture. School reading lists were scrapped, movies were edited on streaming platforms to remove problematic scenes, and monuments to founding figures of the nation were desecrated and removed by state functionaries.

The groundwork for all this had been laid over decades, and the tip-over happened so quickly and seamlessly that its scope just kind of blended into the general madness of that year. The old America wasn’t just defeated, it was abolished. Rhetorical advocacy of it was turned into a social crime that could get one’s life destroyed. The modern state didn’t need to imprison its enemies, though they’ve done some of that. They could just rely on the institutions and the high priests of tech to render dissidents into effective nonpersons, at least in centers of true wealth and power.

Immigration control is now effectively off the table. The issue will still galvanize political energy on the Right and may even nab the Republicans a presidential election before they’re sloughed off into the trash bin of history, but any meaningful restriction has been thrown out the Overton Window. And any reversal is now impossible within the current political system. The United States will be a de facto open borders country going forward. Even the word “immigrant” crosses the line now. We say “migrants.” “Immigrant” implies there’s a “native,” and that doesn’t hold in the West. We’re all just birds now.

Related to that, multiculturalism is now the only accepted platform of the state and its media organs. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say “multiracialism,” but that might get too close to the root. Talk of assimilation to an Anglo-European cultural core, a fixture of moderate discourse in America until just a few a years ago, is now considered to be a “far right” position, and advocacy for it will throw you off the ladder to social and material prosperity. Like talk of immigration restriction, it leaves one open to the Scarlet R of “Racism,” that most sacrosanct of modern taboos. Still legal, technically, but give it time.

“Colorblindness” is now verboten. This is a real shock to Baby Boomers and other casual dwellers of the American mainstream, who have imbibed the “color is only skin-deep” messaging used for decades to soften things up for mass immigration into the West. Ethnic identitarianism under the banner of “diversity” will be the official way of things going forward, with the regime position being that only the white American majority cannot play the game. This is a gambit that will ultimately fail as whites find themselves in the minority, and the true scale of what that means for them comes into stark relief amidst waves of demographic turmoil. But for now, the United State will be a “Tower of Babel” society where the largest faction must remain atomized and silent.

Battled over in the mainstream for decades, gay marriage is now the law of the land, and opposition to it can get you fired and potentially sued via Civil Rights law. Relentless propaganda campaigns had even made it popular, so much so that the Left felt confident enough to move into transgerderism as the next frontier of cultural warfare. This was perhaps the most incredible development of all. In 2019 the issue was marginal, completely out of mind for the vast majority of Americans. By the end of 2020, it was expected at many workplaces and classrooms to display your preferred pronouns along with your name, and failure to do so could out you as noncompliant with regime ideology. A subject of suspicion. Direct resistance to all this could get you fired in many fields. Within just a few years, we’ve arrived at open political conflict over the “transition” (genital mutilation) of children. States that dare pass laws to prevent such atrocities are targeted by media and lawfare and the federal government for disruption and nullification. Where many of the movements discussed above were tipping points of decades-old momentum, the transgenderist attack on traditional America appeared with blinding speed, and is now a sharpened wedge issue used to identify out-group dissidents. Blood is already spattered on the walls of classrooms because of it. Much more will follow.

There are many other fronts that have solidified and opened up that I haven’t mentioned, but the point is that the primary phase of the 2020 cultural revolution is over. Some on the Right may be forgiven for not realizing the nature of the fight they were in, but nonetheless they were defeated with ease, and the United States they find themselves in going forward will demand a very different attitude and orientation than whatever Old America they thought still existed. You are in a post-revolution situation here in 2023 — like France in 1790 or Russia in 1918 — and the shape of things to come is not yet certain. Revolutionary states are fragile, and can tip over in a wide variety of directions subject to events more internal and external.

It’s important to stay strong, as always. But realizing where you are must come before anything else.