Never forget that our political war is only a sub-part of our cultural war, a war between the normal and the patriotic who believe in faith, family, and The Flag, and the weirdos, losers, and mutations who want to change society into something where degenerates like them have the power, prestige, and positions. Andrew Breitbart was right, as always, when he said that politics is downstream of culture. Any political victory will be fleeting if we don’t change the culture back into something approaching normality. A broken society implies broken politics. But to win the culture fight, we have to get back into the culture. We have to play on that court, or we will be locked out of the game forever.
That’s why talking about culture is not going off on a tangent in the wake of this disastrous blue tsunami. We got crushed. Spare me the claims of widespread cheating, which would’ve had to take place in deep red areas where we were looking for it. Claims that the election was somehow stolen en masse — Alaska being an exception — are simply an attempt to create a deus ex machina that relieves us from the necessity of introspection, change, and the hard work necessary to recover the trust that our movement squandered over the last two years. But say we win back the electorate's trust in 2028, or that there is a mirror image of a 2026 red tsunami and the Democrats lose the trust voters invested in them last week. What we would have is a temporary victory, a transitory success. It’s not enough to win elections. We have to win hearts and minds, which means winning back the culture.
Culture is a big topic, so let’s just look at culture here in terms of interpersonal relationships and entertainment. Both of these have an outsized effect on where we are as a society. If you spend any time on social media, you know interpersonal relationships — relationships between men and women specifically — are completely broken. This reality is totally alien to someone like me and many of us reading this who grew up when men and women related to each other primarily in the real world as opposed to the twisted and perverse environment of cyberspace. How did I meet Irina? She was a bridesmaid at my college roommate’s wedding. Back in the day, you met each other in person, face-to-face, maybe at a bar, maybe at a party, maybe at work, maybe you were introduced, or maybe you got seated at the same table at a buddy’s nuptials. You had to deal with other human beings as human beings. It wasn’t perfect. A huge majority of the people you met you weren’t going to have a connection with, but that’s not the key difference from today. The key difference is that, today, cyberspace prevents people from making any connection at all.
Male-female relationships are what create families, and families create a stable society. You didn’t have all this weird, perverted insanity when we had real families. You would think society would therefore promote families, but it doesn’t. It works against them, and you can see it in young people’s attitudes toward interaction. Back in the day, men and women smiled and joked about the foibles and follies of the other sex. Today, you can feel the intensity of the hatred. It’s not just the hairy-pitted feminist who hates men; it’s a huge segment of what would’ve been otherwise normal females a couple of decades ago. And their demands of men, made possible by the meat-market aspects of online dating, are unreal. You hear about women looking for six-six-six. What does that mean? Six-figure income, 6-foot-tall, and a six-pack.
What percentage of men in their 20s or even 30s can meet the standard? It’s a fraction of a fraction. But the ability to keep swiping right or left, whichever direction you sweep to summarily write off a potential match, makes it easy to keep looking for the perfect, and statistically improbable, Chad.
But there aren’t enough Chads to go around, and apparently the Chads have figured this out and built an online harem of young women eager to do whatever it takes to nail down these unicorns. And what happens to the rest of the guys? Nothing. Literally nothing. With the additional considerations of #MeToo fascism and the potential for online humiliation over making a play and failing, a huge number of men are making the superficially rational decision to check out. They can’t compete for today’s women, but then, women can’t compete with the dopamine rush of video games, the pain-dulling buzz of legalized dope, or the ready availability of pornography. That glossy hussy online is always eager; you don’t actually have to have a relationship with her. You don’t even have to try.
We need to undo this, and I’m not sure how. That might be something Republicans should look deeply at as they autopsy the corpse of their credibility going forward. But since the GOP is the more masculine party, the daddy party, if you will, then maybe it should focus on men. The Dems certainly focus on women, along with the gender-bizarre.
The culture has declared war on men as a species. We see this in many ways, but none more intensely than in the media. You don’t see books about men or about men doing men things anymore. When men appear on the page or on screen, the only men presented in a favorable light are pretty much women in word and deed. And as for ones of pallor, forget it.
Here’s an un-fun fact: The New Yorker, which publishes literary fiction, has published not a single white American man born after 1984. Just zero. Unless you’re diverse in terms of some meaningless immutable characteristic, you’re locked out of the heights of culture. But it’s not just the heights. Look at publishing as a whole. We hear that men have checked out of reading, that they just don’t do it anymore. That’s no shock. The tastemakers at the Big Five publishing houses are all overwhelmingly women, like 70 percent. And only a fraction of the 30 percent of men still there are straight. So, it’s no surprise that they ignore male-oriented fiction, because those in that caste despise anything that men might like. A few decades ago, bestseller lists were full of male-oriented fiction — Tom Clancy, Alistair MacLean, and so forth. Are we still getting a little bit from the book world’s big boys? Jack Carr’s books sell like gangbusters, and everybody is loving the new season of “The Terminal List.” But he’s a huge exception to the dismal rule.
My new novel “American Warlord” is from Ark Press, an imprint of Passage Press, which is a new and explicitly conservative label. I’ve written for the big houses before, and they had no idea how to deal with me. None. Now, I’m having good success selling books normal Americans want to read, and so are a lot of folks who publish in smaller houses or even independently. The Amazon distribution option has been a godsend — I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of copies of my Kelly Turnbull and other novels without having to ask the permission of some Chardonnay-swilling leftie in Manhattan who thinks my hero should use his words instead of his .45.
Men will totally read if you assure them there will be no hugging.
The challenge looks overwhelming, but there’s no alternative to facing it head-on. We either change the culture or all the political success in the world will be irrelevant. We need to fix how men and women relate to each other. A component of that is supporting conservative cultural products like mine and those of other folks who are out there trying to make a difference in the culture. And you know what? We can. They marched through the culture and changed it, so there’s nothing that locks it in and makes it impossible to change back. There are positive trends. Some people are becoming more religious. Some people see the disaster of modern leftism and are harkening to traditional values. And then the enemy will help. What the Left is selling is poison. A society based on leftist tropes cannot succeed. It will collapse under its own putrid weight. Who will be there to pick up society and brush it off? Normal people. Heck, somebody should write a book that would horrify the publishers about just that very scenario.
Kurt’s new action-packed conservative novel, “American Warlord,” is finally out and available now! With gushing blurbs by Instapundit, Dana Loesch, Jesse Kelly, and more, American Warlord is the perfect way to forget the midterms even as you support conservative entertainment!
My super-secret email is Kurt.schlichter@townhall.com.
