Andrew Breitbart once famously proclaimed that politics is downstream from culture. I don’t think that a lot of people fully understood his meaning at the time, but it has become all too clear as the radical left, intent on destroying America, has marched through our institutions.
The long march through our institutions threatens the very fabric not just of our society and culture but of what it means to be an American. America is not just free market principles applied to a federation of states; we are also, arguably more so, defined by our exceptionalism.
That exceptionalism has always been rooted in our culture: God, family, flag and country. And American exceptionalism is found in every off-shoot of each. From our long-held and cherished principles of freedom and liberty to our sense that each generation leave a better, more prosperous, nation to our children to our pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps rugged individualism that understood the need for devotion to our fellow Americans, to being good neighbors and better citizens.
Andrew Breitbart alerted us to the dangers that we now see manifested in and infesting our schools, corporations, even our religious institutions, and of course, permeating all branches of our government.
We did fight back, but perhaps we didn’t quite see—or fully appreciate—that this battle-cry was tied directly to Andrew’s pointed observation that politics is downstream from culture.
Like a metastatic cancer, leftist ideology has slowly—though with increasing speed of late—spread into every area of our society and culture and therefore into the lives of our children. Leftists cannot abide God and faith; they fear a united people who rally around a flag, who are patriotic and believe in their nation and its founding principles; they see the family unit as a barrier to their cradle to grave nanny state; and they utterly loathe anything that is or can be called uniquely American, not simply as a part of their divide and conquer strategy but because they have a deranged hatred for America and all that she stands for.
Their goal is our nation’s utter destruction, and they are leveraging our institutions to destroy our national identity, to stamp out uniquely American values and principles, and to undermine the very idea of what it means to be an American.
The radical, regressive left are engaged in, and as Andrew noted, full race and class warfare, in imposing cultural Marxism on an American model that cannot withstand its crushing destruction of all that it means to be an American. In that sense, we are very much in a fight against, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis states, “an existential threat” to our country.
The battle for the soul of our country has been dismissively referred to by the activist leftist media, influencers, and pundits as frivolous sniping about the term “woke.”
Unfortunately, it appears that former president Trump is eager to push their narrative that the problem is the term “woke” and not what it actually means for our country.
Earlier this week, Trump distanced himself from the right-wing buzzword, saying Republicans are overusing “woke.”While speaking during a presidential campaign stop in Iowa on Thursday, Trump told the crowd at the Westside Conservative Club that “half” the people who use the word “woke” can’t define it.”I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear the term ‘woke woke woke,” said Trump in a video shared on Twitter. “It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”
The leftist media is, naturally, overjoyed to have the discussion shift to the term “woke” rather than to the destructive agenda the word speaks to, so they asked DeSantis about Trump’s dismissal of the term.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) defined “woke” as a “form of Cultural Marxism” when asked to define the word in response to former President Trump’s remark that he does not like to define the word because “half the people can’t even define it.”When asked by NBC correspondent Dasha Burns to define the term during his campaign stop in Iowa on Saturday, DeSantis responded that it is “basically a war on the truth.”“Look, we know what woke is, it’s a form of cultural Marxism,” DeSantis said. “It’s about putting merit and achievement behind identity politics, and it’s basically a war on the truth. And as that has infected institutions, and it has corrupted institutions. So, you’ve got to be willing to fight the woke, we’ve done that in Florida, and we proudly consider ourselves the state where woke goes to die.”
While Trump’s team pointed out (accurately) that Trump did not say the culture wars are “no big deal,” Trump has previously dismissed the culture wars more broadly, favoring a focus on economic policy, trade, and the military.
Indeed, Trump has come at DeSantis from the left on cultural issues from abortion to protecting our nation’s children from being sexualized in schools, from siding with Disney over DeSantis to his team expressing its displeasure with the pushback against and boycott of Bud Light.
It really doesn’t matter what we call the woke and their evil agenda, it’s what they are doing to this great country that matters. Trump knows exactly what he is doing when going along with the left’s desire to shift the discussion not to policy but to the descriptor “woke.” Trump is playing into the left’s hands by shifting the narrative from a destructive agenda to mere word choice. His chaotic and incomprehensible shift on this issue is worrying, particularly when there is so much more at stake than the 2024 GOP nomination for president.
Trump once said that without borders, we don’t have a country, and he is correct. But what kind of country do we have even if the border is closed and the economy is humming if what it means to be America, to be an American, is destroyed in all of our institutions and throughout our society and culture?
This moment definitely has a “Now or Never” feel to it.
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