Tag: culture wars

You Can’t Cancel Music

The Portly Politico2 Comments

My younger brother got me onto a kick of listening to YouTube videos from Turkey Tom.  Tom makes video documentaries covering the deep lore of various Internet fandoms and communities, with an encyclopedic depth of knowledge of the various controversies, nontroversies, and schisms that dominate the lives of the terminally online.

In the wake of the Spring Jam, which saw all sorts of young people and adults come together to make and enjoy music on my front porch, one of his videos really hit me.  It’s an example of cancel culture and AntiFa run amok, and how despite the cowardice of event organizers, plucky youngsters staged a fun, peaceful concert in the park.

Read More »

Phone it in Friday XXXII: Pat Buchanan’s Legacy

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

It’s a true Phone it in Friday today, as this post is (slightly) late, and I’m going to keep it brief due to time constraints.

Patrick J. Buchanan, the great writer and political analyst, officially retired from his decades-long career in journalism a few weeks ago.  His influence in conservative politics is hard to overstate.  Even though he spent much of his career since the 1990s as the alternative paleoconservative voice in an increasingly interventionist and neoliberal Republican Party, that disciplined commitment to his values and the original vision of the American Founding made him one of the most impactful political figures of our time.

I wrote more extensively about Buchanan’s legacy in a piece for American Patriot Radio entitled “Pat Buchanan’s America” back in 2017, in the early months of the Trump administration.  Trump, in many ways, was the political apotheosis of Buchanan’s views on trade, immigration, and the culture wars.  Put more simply:  no Buchanan, no Trump.

Read More »

Primary Election Day 2022 in South Carolina

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Today (Tuesday, 14 June 2022) we have primary elections in South Carolina.  I’ll be honest, I haven’t followed these races nearly as closely as I should have been, but the big one is the Republican primary for South Carolina US Congressional District 7.

The current occupant of that position, Congressman Tom Rice, infamously voted in favor of the impeachment of President Donald Trump following the 6 January 2021 protests over the fraudulent election.  That single vote has haunted Tom Rice, who was first elected in 2012, then the 7th Congressional District was created, ever since.

I like Tom Rice.  He’s was overwhelmingly pro-Trump, that one vote notwithstanding.  He’s been pretty good on the House Ways and Means Committee.  He’s brought a lot of important infrastructure projects to the district, like the inland port.  He’s also a very sweet, congenial man one-on-one.

But that one vote.  Perhaps it’s silly to vote against a man based on one vote, when almost all the others cut the other way.  That’s certainly what Rice’s team is hoping South Carolinians in District 7 will think.

But that one vote was a betrayal so deep, most of us can’t abide it.

Read More »

TBT: Reclaim the Rainbow

The Portly Politico43 Comments

Well, here we are—that time of year when every corporation changes its logo into a rainbow format to avoid the persecution of people who define their entire identities based on which body part they want to stick into which hole.  God have mercy on us all.

Wouldn’t it be great if corporations pretended to love Christianity, like in the good old days?  Better yet, they could actually be Christian.  I guess Hobby Lobby, My Pillow, and Chick-Fil-A will have to do.

One casualty of our fascination with buggery—besides the kids groomed into “alternative” lifestyles and exposed to men in dresses reading them children’s books—is the rainbow, a symbol of God’s Promise never to flood the Earth again.

Rainbows are beautiful, but like everything the Left touches, they’ve been appropriated to represent something odious and sinful.

It’s time to “Reclaim the Rainbow“:

Read More »

Son of Sonnet: Passion

The Portly Politico2 Comments

While scribbling away on some blog posts last week, I had a pleasant surprise:  a new poetry submission care of Son of Sonnet!  It’s a work about the undeniable passion shared between men and women.

Regular readers know that I am an unalloyed fan of Son’s poetry, and I encourage each of my readers to consider a subscription to his Locals page.  It’s the best way to support his work directly, and I know that appreciates every subscriber.  Son is also very responsive to feedback and comments, so it makes for a lively community.

I’ve really been beating this drum lately—we need to support creators on our side of this great culture war.  The Left creates crap culture, but they support it and produce a lot of it; what they lack in quality they make up for with financial support and total media saturation.

But I digress.  Your generous subscriptions to my SubscribeStar page have made it possible to patronize Son’s work.  As a community of artists, readers, and pundits, we should work together as much as possible to cultivate and support one another’s talents.  I can’t pay Son much—yet—but I’m able to offer him something for his talents because of your generosity.

For a sample of Son’s work on this blog, check out The Gemini Sonnets; you can read all six here:  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6.

You can also read Son of Sonnet’s poetry on his Telegram channel, on Gab, on Minds, and, of course, on Locals.

Read More »

Social Justice Jokers for Hire

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Everyone here on the Right knows that the Left can’t meme.  Just like conservatives are better at talk radio, we’re better at making hilarious, spicy memes.

Perhaps it’s because the Left is firmly in the driver’s seat of culture and the institutions, so they’re just bad at humor, which requires poking at officialdom.  Perhaps it’s because their worldview is so inherently warped and cringe, what they think is riotously funny doesn’t translate to the rest of us.  Their hypersensitivity and adherence to identity politics make it impossible to poke fun at anyone or anything without suffering the consequences of their own cannibalizing cancel culture.

If anything, Leftist attempts at meme-ing just come across as propaganda.  Propaganda is not clever or subtle; it’s certainly not funny.  It just comes across as sanctimonious and pushy, which is probably why the Left loves it so much.

(At the risk of being even more controversial, it probably doesn’t help that the primary consumers and creators of Leftist memes are women, and with few exceptions, women aren’t exactly known for being riotously funny.  It explains why so much of female “comedy” resembles paying a visit to one’s overly detailed gynecologist.)

On the Right, we’re pilloried for making memes about a cute cartoon frog living a traditional life.  Hillary Clinton even attacked Pepe as a symbol of “white supremacy” while running for President of the United States, attempting to garner votes and donations by stirring up hysteria about frog.

Not only can the Left not meme; they can’t help but ruin existing memes with their overly-earnest moralizing.

Read More »

SubscribeStar Saturday: Life Finds a Way

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

The winning just keeps coming—first Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, which is a major victory for free speech; now, what appears to be the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973), one of the most egregiously unconstitutional Supreme Court rulings ever made.

Conservatives have fought for nearly fifty years for this very outcome.  I did not think it would happen in my lifetime—or ever—given the extreme leftward drift of the country.

But elections matter, and this likely ruling demonstrates why.  All of those conservatives who reluctantly voted for Donald Trump because of the prospect of his nominating constitutionalists to the bench have been vindicated, as have those who supported Trump from the get-go:  his Supreme Court nominations clinched the reversal of this terrible, destructive ruling.

(I note with some degree of amused irony that it was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stubborn refusal to vacate the bench that made it possible for President Trump to replace her with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett; seeing how feminists glorify “RBG” as the protector of their “right” to murder children, it was her tight grip on her SCOTUS seat that, ultimately, doomed Roe to the ash bin of history.)

The social media backlash from disenchanted floozies has been ludicrous.  One friend on Facebook even argued that abortions are a form of mental health treatment, as they spare would-be mothers from the struggles of postpartum depression.

But even ladies who I thought weren’t so hung up on a fictitious constitutional “right” to abortion have been bemoaning the end of their “reproductive freedom” or what not.  The “abortion is mental health treatment” girl also bemoaned conservatives’ desire to “control” women.  I don’t want to control anyone, but I don’t want murder to be legal.

Regardless, that hysteria is grounded in constitutional ignorance and the terrifying normalization of infanticide over the past fifty years.  As I’ve patiently explained to many hysterical women over the past week, overturning Roe just means that the debate over abortion returns to the people and the States.  Now, instead of one imaginary constitutional “right”—note that the Constitution is completely silent on the issue of abortion, as it is on almost everything, leaving it up to the people to decide through their State legislatures—there will be fifty different State level policies.  Some States will put loads of restrictions on it (though I doubt any State will completely ban it); other States will probably allow two-year olds to be murdered if they prove to be too much of a nuisance.

What the reversal of Roe is, then, is not just a major victory for the life of the unborn—it’s a victory for federalism.  It might also mean that feminist floozies will have to exercise a little more self-control—or move to California.

It also marks an important moment of spiritual redemption for the United States—I hope!

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

SubscribeStar Saturday: Twitter Flies Free

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!  Elon Musk, the whimsical Willy Wonka of our time, has purchased Twitter.

While I have a Twitter account, I don’t really use it that frequently, with the exception of checking out some spicy Tweets on occasion (but even those are gone, thanks to the platform’s arbitrary censorship).  I find the format clunky and unwieldy, especially when trying to read long threads or responses to Tweets.

It’s also a cesspool of Leftist hand-wringing and overwrought, fake stories, in which progressives claim their small children are asking them if Trump is going to kill the trannies or what not.  At its worst, it’s an outrage factory; at its best, it’s an echo chamber for the mainstream media.

There’s a long history of censorship of conservative and populist voices on Twitter.  The rumors (which will be confirmed or otherwise by the time this post goes live) suggest that Twitter’s quarterly report won’t look good, so Musk was able to scoop up the company at the price of $44 billion, or $54.20 per share.  That represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s stock price as of 1 April 2022.

Basically, Twitter went woke—like, MEGA woke—and it’s starting to go broke.

The news of Musk’s purchase of Twitter is heartening, as he describes himself as a free speech absolutist.  Trump has pledged to stay on TRUTH Social, but I still hope Musk restores his account, even if it’s a symbolic gesture.

While Musk’s takeover is promising—let a thousand crazy Tweets bloom!—it does suggest that conservatives are on hard times if we’re hoping the whims of a boyish entrepreneur/government subsidy devourer will restore free speech on a failing, but still important, Big Tech platform.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Go to Church

The Portly Politico47 Comments

Easter is just a few days away, and churches will be filled to bursting with twice-a-year “Christians,” people that still feel some vague sense that they should go to church on Easter and at Christmas, even if they can’t quite articulate why, and don’t attend for most of the rest of the year.

That church attendance is in decline is no mystery.  Sure, there are plenty of nominal Christians who attend church regularly for their own reasons—the social aspects, the opportunities for professional development and career advancement, etc.—who aren’t truly Believers, but since we cannot know the content of one’s heart, church attendance is a pretty good gauge for religiosity in the United States.

I live in the rural South, so there are churches on every street corner.  There are tiny cinderblock buildings in the middle of nowhere with names like “First Church of the Holy Apostolic Prophecy” that look like tool sheds that have been converted into places of worship.  There are decadent megachurches.  There are churches that date back centuries, and churches that were planted a week ago.

Yet even here, Biblical illiteracy stuns me.  Sure, I’m one of those guys who knows that something is “in the Bible,” even if I can’t always place exactly where it is (that’s what Bing is for).  But when I write “Biblical illiteracy,” I mean that people lack a basic understanding of the simplest Bible stories.

I’ve related this anecdote elsewhere, but I’ll never forget teaching a philosophy class years ago in which we were discussing Danish Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard famously argued that attempts to prove the existence of God rhetorically, logically, or otherwise were the philosophical equivalents of building the Tower of Babel—man’s Gnostic attempt to “reach” God, not to be close to Him, but to challenge God’s Supremacy.

The Tower of Babel is Vacation Bible School 101—really, it’s Sunday School 101.  The Tower of Babel would be Track 2, Side 1 of The Old Testament’s Greatest Hits, if such an album existed.

Despite that, none of my students knew the story of the Tower of Babel.  Even a young lady who was a very committed Christian did not remember the story, and I know her parents, at the very least, had taught it to her!

Read More »