As you watch the debate, remember that culture war matters

The Trump & Clinton ShowEven #NeverTrumpers have to concede that Trump is the one who looked down upon the culture wars, built a barricade, and loudly stood atop it hollering “Stop!” at the top of his lungs. With Trump in the White House, political correctness and all its attendant evils might no longer be issues. So as you prepare to watch the debate, or as you think about the debate after having already watched it, let me just remind you of the craziness that is the American culture warin the Age of Obama.

A word of caution — as is true for the audience filing into the debate at Hofsta, let me warn you that there are triggering ideas here. They might make anyone who reads this post stop and think how terribly the Left has injured America’s moral backbone and common sense.

Damn women.  There’s been a big to-do about the change in culture that sees people desperate to be in selfies with famous people. The ne plus ultra of this trend is a marvelous photo of Hillary standing alone on a box at the back of a room, with the rest of the room facing away from Hillary, arms extended in the air, with each person trying to get a selfie that includes Hillary. You can see the picture here, along with a great caption contest.

Perhaps because one of my Little Bookworms selfies, I’ve become immune to the selfie trend. That is, I don’t like it, but it doesn’t surprise me.

I wanted you to note something different about the picture:  all those navel-gazing selfie takers, desperate to project themselves into their favorite candidate’s world, are women. It’s the damn college educated women who are propping up Hillary’s campaign. Speaking as a woman myself, perhaps it would have been better if the 19th Amendment had never passed. First Harding and now Hillary. How dumb can women be?

Conservatives need to throw themselves in the culture war.  The Kaepernick capers reminded me of something rather sad about conservatives:  we like fussing about things on Facebook, and we’ll boycott things that don’t really matter (forget Target; let’s go to WalMart), but we will not make an effort where it inconveniences us or ruins one of our pleasures. I’m guilty myself, in that I shop at Costco, which is owned by a rabid Hillary supporter. Shopping at Costco makes my life easier (and cheaper) and I’ve been unwilling to forego that.

John Hawkins points out that other conservatives, if they’re disturbed by the disrespect for our flag and our national anthem at sporting events need to stop going and stop watching:

CONSERVATIVES are why these overgrown jackasses can continue to be unpatriotic. That’s because you’re the people who are offended by their behavior, but you won’t do anything about it. That’s the same reason conservatives have lost the schools, Hollywood, the mainstream media and it’s why the NFL is turning into a bigger, even dumber version of the Daily Kos. If liberals are going to reward you for trashing America and conservatives aren’t going to punish you for it, a certain percentage of people are going to take advantage of that. That’s just the way of the world and as we see again and again and again, it’s a slippery slope. Today it’s the NFL; tomorrow it’ll be the NBA and MLB. Next thing you know, the NFL will be making kids listen to a lecture from Al Gore before they start the NFL Punt, Pass & Kick program while the adults will be forced to watch anti-gun lectures at half time. Why wouldn’t they do that if liberals will swoon over them in the press and conservatives will keep giving them money?

He’s got a point. Maybe it’s time to cross Costco off my list. (I can’t cross much else off, because I’ve pretty much removed myself from pop culture and I like my affordable generic products.

I can’t tell if this is a feminism fail or a feminism success:  Men are fine working for women bosses. It’s the women who don’t like working for another woman.

I’m a woman who likes manly men. One of the things I noticed when I got my Little Bookworm settled in at her Obscenely Expensive Liberal Arts College was that the many of the boys sounded feminine because they’ve adopted the habit of ending sentences on a questioning note, as girls habitually do. Put more strongly, what I noticed was that there were no men there: Just girls, women, and a few boys. Men, mature men, whether gay or straight, were conspicuously missing. I’m not the only one who has noticed that our hyperfeminized society, having marginalized men by saying that they’re all rapists and brutes, is now pushing to do away with external attributes of masculinity such as muscles.

The lies used to push the same-sex agenda.  There are problems studying same-sex parenting. If you say it’s not perfect, you will be destroyed. The Left united to destroy Mark Regnerus who collated a massive amount of data to demonstrate that children raised in same-sex households do not thrive. The study’s conclusion was unacceptable.

Now a new study has come out of Australia and the Daily Mail boasts that it shows that “research reveals same-sex couples make the BEST parents.”

How can that be? It strikes me as intuitively wrong, especially because the same-sex couples I know, while loving their children, are crazy in ways only same-sex couples can be. (Straight couples can also be crazy, but there’s a unique dynamic in same-sex parenting. And no, I can’t prove it, but it’s true whenever I see it happen.) It turns out that it depends how you define “best.”

When it comes to parenting, when I think of “best,” I think of happy, well-adjusted children who succeed in life and have very low incidences of all sorts of destructive behavior. According to the study, though, that’s not what “best” parenting is: “. . . children with lesbian parents were better equipped than other children to deal with issues of equality and diversity.”

There you have it: raising the “best” child means raising a child who adopts the Left’s standards about sexuality.

Lionel Shriver comes out swinging again. I blogged about Lionel Shriver’s magnificent talk challenging the stupidity of the “cultural appropriation” uproar sweeping academia, as well as about the worst rebuttal ever that a Muslim Australian women wrote justifying using the cry of “cultural appropriation” to prevent authors from ever writing about any characters who differ in any way from the author. To her great credit, Shriver hasn’t let the matter rest. I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to get the New York Times to print an opinion piece she wrote making the same point:

When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left. In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech. It is Australia’s conservatives arguing for the amendment of this law.

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump.

Welcome to the real world, Ms. Shriver. The Left values freedom only when it works to its benefit. As Erdogan, the increasingly totalitarian Turkish leader said when still mayor of Istanbul, he views democracy as a bus: “Once I get to my stop, I’m getting off.”

Patience is a virtue.  I’ve mentioned before the fact that the Muslims who have been moving out of the Middle East and into other parts of the world, especially Europe, should have held their fire for another decade or so. With Europeans no longer having babies, between Muslim birthrates and Muslim immigration, the Islamic world could have had its caliphate without firing a shot.

However, once they reached a critical mass, the West’s Muslim population felt it had the wind at its back and showed its teeth. In a normal world, that would have been enough to send them reeling out of the West and back into the Stone Age. That they’ve made such headway is only because the West has no inclination to defend itself. We’re neither drowning nor swimming; we’re just treading water.

The same holds true in America’s culture wars. The Left has done a splendid job, using academic and the media, in indoctrinating several generations of young Americans into its belief systems, everything from climate change to gay marriage. It should have stopped pressing so hard at that point and made sure people got used to these new ideas.

But was was true with the Muslims, the collective Left, without Obama in the White House, couldn’t wait. In the last eight years, horrified Americans have been exposed to triggers, microaggressions, gender madness, and all of the other insanity that lies at the heart of the Left’s attempt to control American culture completely. Trump represents pushback. If they’d been patient, even Trump would not have found willing supporters to join him in the war against cultural Marxism.

Take the culture wars seriously because they matter. I can’t add anything to this video: