"The Bright Side of Cultural Collapse"
by John Wilder
"If you’ve ever felt like America’s cultural compass is spinning like a drunk uncle at a Latvian wedding reception, you’re not wrong. I believe most of my readers can remember back to the 1970s and 1980s.At that time, Americans had a (mostly) shared reality, love it or hate it.
That shared reality kept the country rowing in roughly the same direction. Getting out of Vietnam was a political choice, and (we know now) hard-GloboLeftist Walter Cronkite was instrumental in getting us out after hard-GloboLeftist president LBJ got us involved. The media could start and stop wars, at will.
Now? It’s a fractured funhouse mirror where the Super Bowl® and presidential elections seem to be the last gasps of collective attention, like family reunions where everyone shows up but nobody talks afterwards. The rest of the time, we’re each siloed in our respective algorithm alcoves, each getting a different view of reality, sort of like the way she looked after six beers and the way she looked at 8AM. How’d we get here? Blame the usual suspects: tech titans and open-border overlords who can’t get enough of cheap labor and expensive ballots.
Picture this: pre-1930 America, a patchwork quilt of immigrants fresh off the boat around 1900, all crammed into cities like Ellis Island escapees. Cultures clashed harder than a bad blind date. Languages tangled, traditions tussled, and the “melting pot” was more like a slow simmer with occasional boil-overs. How bad was it? Immigration was essentially shut down with the Immigration Act of 1924 which sharply restricted numbers and essentially banned immigration from most non-Western cultures.
At this time, however, technology makes its appearance: enter radio, then television. These were the great homogenizers of America. From FDR’s fireside chats in the ’30s to Reagan’s ranch riffs in the ’80s, these boxes beamed a single narrative into every living room with little competition. Three networks – ABC®, CBS©, NBC™ – dictated the national conversation.
Commie Cronkite signed off with “And that’s the way it is,” and America, by and large, believed him. Why? Mainly because there were no other options except some fringe samizdat. Radio had replaced the town square and TV turbocharged it. Now it was I Love Lucy laughs for all, and heavy-handed M*A*S*H moralizing nationwide, with Johnny Carson‘s couch as the national nightcap.
This centralized media forced most of the immigrants into an ersatz Americana because there weren’t Slavic-language radio stations in most places. Right or wrong, it forged a (more or less) unified American ethos from 1930 to the mid-1990s. Sure, it was sanitized suburbia with a side of Cold War conformity and liberal-left inclusion, but it worked: shared heroes (John Wayne, anyone?), shared villains (Commies), shared laughs from non-stereotypical minorities who were, after all, just like us (Cosby before the fall and his final TV show: Women Say The Darndest Things).
We were one nation under three channels, indivisible, with sitcoms and soaps for all. Then the cracks came. First, cable TV in the 1980s splintered the spectrum, MTV™ for the kids, CNN® for the news junkies, ESPN© for the jocks. But the real wrecking ball? Then, the Internet appeared in the mid-1990s, and was supercharged by smartphones in 2007.
Suddenly, infinite choices: blogs, YouTube®, TikTok©, X®. Everyone is a broadcaster, nobody is the boss. Literally no one tells me what to write, I’m free to bring up uncomfortable truths. This resulted in something the GloboLeft hates: attention is atomized. Their rescue, though, is that now Faceborg™ and Google© could manipulate results and (mostly) keep ideas within politically acceptable limits.
The Super Bowl® still pulls 100M+ viewers, a rare ritual that the NFL™ is trying to destroy by featuring increasingly divisive halftime shows. Elections? They glue us to screens every four years, like national therapy sessions. But otherwise?
The GloboLefties lap up MSNBC® memes, righties rally on Rumble™ and there is no overlap. Also, there are no more “water cooler” moments since the odds of anyone watching the same things as you are very low.
Worse, massive immigration since the ’90s poured gasoline on the fire. Post-1965 reforms flipped the script: waves after wave from Latin America, Asia, Africa from clashing cultures. Traditional American values? Now they’re “racist,” “xenophobic,” “bigoted,” “transphobic,” “climate-denying,” “patriarchal” poison. Family, faith, freedom? Hate crimes.
The people didn’t vote for this mosaic meltdown; The GloboLeftElite engineered it. Cheap labor lured corporations; votes lured Democrats. As Lenin reportedly quipped, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Here, the “rope” was imported workers who tilt 80% GloboLeft, hanging the old republic with demographic destiny. By 2026’s doorstep, consensus is kaput. COVID crackdowns under Biden tried to muzzle dissent: shadowbans, deplatforms, “disinfo” dossiers. But the dam burst.
GloboLeftElite’s iron fist? In the United States in 2025, it appears to be wholly rusted. Political correctness, once their shield, lies in tatters. Why? Dissenting elites like Musk and Trump flipped the script. X™ became a free-fire zone. Ideas flowed unfettered, exposing the emperor’s empty ethos. “Woke” went from weapon to punchline; folks stopped fearing the “racist” label like it was yesterday’s news.
So, where does this cultural shatter take us? Short-term: more balkanization. Red states redline GloboLeft policies, banning DEI diktats, booting illegals, building walls (literal and legal). Blue bubbles boil over with sanctuary silliness and virtue-vomiting, with California leading the country in giving free money to illegal freeloaders. No national narrative means that, right now, there are no peaceful national solutions.
America does have quite an advantage, though an armed citizenry and what remains of federalism, where I expect state freedoms will increase as the central government weakens. American was built as a country that could fight back against overlords with the preservation of the 1st and 2nd Amendments being so crucial to us not falling into the horrific tyranny we see places like England currently entering.
My take, long term? Free ideas forge fresh foundations, with a Tradright renaissance entirely possible: young men gymming, girls gardening, families flourishing in flyover fortresses. I do see that the GloboLeft’s grip will have to slips as their “diversity” devolves into division because the moslems in Dearborn and Somalisota hate gays and want Sharia. The GloboLeft cannot understand, at all, why their pets hate diversity. We’re not done. The rope the GloboLeftists sold? We’ll use it to climb."
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by Joseph A. Tainter, here:
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