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But the black community believed it. In their eyes, Anthony was a good boy who did nothing wrong. Metcalf embodied the Ku Klux Klan and committed a grave offense by telling Anthony that he was sitting in the wrong place. The black youth had no choice but to stab his white opponent.

The reality was quite different. Anthony was asked by Metcalf and his teammates to leave the tent 15 times. It was only supposed to be for their team. Anthony refused and threatened “touch me and find out.” When Metcalf leaned in toward Anthony, the black youth stabbed him.

No reasonable person would find this an act of self-defense. But blacks did.

The case should redpill the public on the absurdity of black delusions. Americans like to believe that everyone, regardless of color or creed, will set aside their own biases and make decisions based on facts and logic. Obviously, people, regardless of color or creed, often struggle to do that. But it’s particularly a problem for many blacks. Anthony was their hero here. The facts didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was black and his victim was white. That made him innocent in their eyes. Any disagreement could only be motivated by racism.

This isn’t an opinion left to the fringes and anonymous X accounts. These are the opinions of black lawmakers, entertainers, and “civil rights” leaders.

The good news is that the rest of America ignored these ramblings. Anthony’s guilt was clear to the jury, just as much as it was to the public. Five years ago, it may have been a different story. But not today.

It’s another sign of black power in decline. Anyone encountering Anthony’s defenders would realize they’re insane. Seeing so many blacks engage in this nonsense–complete with violent threats, total disregard for facts, and general obnoxious behavior–did tremendous reputational damage to this demographic. It further reinforces the notion that a demographically transformed America will be less, not more, inclined to sympathize with black delusions.

Many Highly Respected listeners wondered if Anthony would escape justice. While always an unlikely prospect in 2026, there have been numerous cases where a black criminal evaded justice in the murder or assault of a racial outsider.

Here are a few examples I’ve previously covered:

• A jury deadlocked over convicting two black thieves of the 2017 murder of an elderly white photographer in San Francisco. The murder was caught on film and the defendants admitted to committing the heinous act. But defense attorneys claimed that one perp could not be found responsible due to her suffering from a “sickle cell crisis,” drug withdrawals, and a low IQ. This argument apparently persuaded some of the jurors.

• The three black men involved in Ethan Liming’s 2022 beating death saw their murder charges reduced to lesser offenses. One of the participants was only sentenced to 180 days in jail.

• Kansas City officials refused to press murder charges in 2022 against a black woman who shot and killed an off-duty white firefighter. The firefighter had confronted the woman’s boyfriend after he threatened a gas station clerk. The boyfriend fought the white man, but the fight was not going well for him. The girlfriend shot the firefighter, which authorities determined was in self-defense.

• A black man in South Carolina was found not guilty in 2021 after shooting and killing a white retired volunteer fire chief as the victim sat in his car. The shooter claimed the victim startled him and that was a sufficient explanation to find him innocent of murder.

There are even more cases you can find from the late 2010s and early 2020s. In the age of peak woke, black power reigned supreme. It allowed some criminals to literally get away with murder. They could claim they were “frightened” or that a murder conviction would send another unfortunate soul to jail.

Black jurors openly say they will rule based on racial solidarity. Multiple black jurors who exonerated the clearly guilty O.J. Simpson did so to get back at white America. A number of potential black jurors in the Metcalf case were dismissed because they professed they couldn’t find a “brother” guilty. The jury ended up including zero blacks.

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett expressed the views that would’ve once (maybe) helped Anthony walk free. “Black women, especially black women who have black male children, live in fear and agony every single day,” she argued in one clip. “A fear and agony that I promise you the Metcalfs probably had never spend a day living that way.” She also told TMZ that Anthony was only found guilty due to racism.

Metcalf’s supporters argued that they now have to worry about their sons being assaulted left and right by whites since they can no longer defend themselves. It takes serious delusion to believe black youths risk attack by white youths. We don’t live in Birth of a Nation. But many blacks think we do.

These delusions, unfortunately, were treated seriously during peak woke. They helped convict Derek Chauvin and the white men who confronted Ahmaud Arbery. These arguments are why cities across the country stopped enforcing the law and allowed a crime wave to kill thousands. They inspired corporations and schools to teach about white privilege and systemic racism. It was dangerous to challenge this insanity. Criticizing Black Lives Matter was enough to get you fired or kicked out of college.

We’re, thankfully, no longer living in that time.

Anthony’s supporters did more disservice to his cause than anything else. It’s jarring for Americans to see $600k raised for his defense–and then wasted on luxuries by the Anthony family. Regular Americans can’t comprehend people violently threatening peaceful whites who simply showed up at the courthouse to show support for the Metcalf family. They can’t understand how anyone could get this worked up about a clearly guilty killer.

The scenes outside the courthouse, alone, did generational reputational damage to black America.

The Anthony verdict follows another case where black delusions suffered a major loss. An Asian store owner, Rick Chow, was found not guilty last week in the shooting death of a black thief. This case would’ve been treated as a new Trayvon Martin case in another time, and it’s likely it would’ve resulted in a guilty verdict for Chow. But Chow’s lawyers proved he acted in self-defense to a jury, to the chagrin of black leaders.

Black politicians and entertainers expending social capital to defend Anthony was a terrible mistake. But they’re too stuck in their own bubble to realize this. They think they can cow public opinion just by saying “racist” and pretend Anthony was the Emmett Till who fought back. They were wrong.

Some right-wingers think this racial solidarity is an advantage. But in this case, it was more of a disadvantage. Obviously, it would’ve worked in their favor if it got Anthony off a murder charge. But it didn’t work. It prevented blacks from even being on the jury and appalled the rest of the country.

It was easier for black leaders to convince the country of these delusions under the old black-white dynamic. We fell for Tawana Brawley, the Duke Lacrosse case, Trayvon Martin, and many other fables thanks to the controlled media environment and cultural memes about black oppression. In the past, the media would’ve not interviewed Anthony supporters outside the courthouse; it would do too much damage to the narrative. In the uncontrolled media environment of today, we all can see how they think and act in response to a brutal black-on-white murder. There’s no way to sugarcoat it.

America’s new arrivals, unlike many normie whites, aren’t that interested in black oppression myths. They know they don’t really benefit from them, and many of them are confused by the rest of America’s willingness to believe them. They’re not that interested in a rainbow coalition that serves black interests, particularly when it encourages criminals to prey on them.

Mass immigration brings a host of problems. But one of its few upsides is that it undermines the power of black mythology over American life. This all comes across as nonsense to Guatemalans and Pakistanis. The non-whites on the Metcalf jury ruled the same as the whites.

Black cultural and systemic advantages are weakening. There may soon come a time that blacks will have to assimilate to normal American standards to get anywhere. They may no longer get special privileges just for being black. If they kill a white kid over a seat, they will go to jail for murder just like anyone. If they want to go to Harvard, they will need the same grades and SAT as that of the rest of the class. If they want a good job, they will need to offer more than their skin color.

They will still have MLK Day, Black History Month, and Juneteenth. Academic history will still fixate on their stories and problems. And we still might give Oscars to movies just because they’re made by blacks. But they will never get reparations, they will never get the two-tier justice, and they will never get the special citizen status many of them desire.

America has moved on from the days of mandatory Afrolatry. Black leaders and celebrities just haven’t gotten the memo.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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Controversy isn’t new to Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner. His Totenkopf tattoo and edgy Reddit posts are already old news and didn’t dent his candidacy. In fact, he became so popular among Maine Democrats that his once-frontrunner primary opponent, former Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race rather than face the part-time oysterman.

But now the Democrats’ blue-collar star is in serious trouble–and it has nothing to do with his fondness for the Third Reich. Several women have come forward to declare Platner a BAD MAN. Some of the complaints are legitimate, some not so legitimate. Multiple women reported that Platner messaged them on dating apps while he was married and sexted them. This would be bad for any politician, and is a story deserving of news coverage. But he’s also facing charges of being a “bad” boyfriend based on bitter ex-lovers. It’s common for public figures to be hit with such accusations, but the case against Platner is pretty thin. It’s women claiming a messy relationship with a combat veteran amounted to abuse. But it seems exaggerated. Still, these reports did produce the funniest line in the 2026 campaign. Platner’s alleged comment to one ex that he wanted to rape a home intruder, but “not in a gay way” is a content gold mine.

Regardless of the merits of these claims, it’s now implanted in the public mind that Platner has too much “toxic masculinity.” This is his biggest problem with Democratic voters, far more than his fascination with the Third Reich and anti-Christian Reddit posts. Platner’s party is a gynocracy that will ruin a man’s career over the most dubious of MeToo accusations.

Platner still might win in Maine, but his national aspirations are over. There’s no way a guy like that can win a national primary. It’s also very likely Janet Mills would’ve trounced Platner in the primary if these revelations had come out sooner. An SS tattoo is forgivable; a woman claiming you’re abusive because you argued with her 12 years ago is not.

Still, as stated above, it might not be enough to cripple his candidacy. A year ago, I thought Platner’s Totenkopf tat would be too much for Democratic voters to stomach. I was wrong. Mainers may overlook his new baggage simply because he’s a Democrat.

Democrats are desperate to win back men and hope male candidates can do the job. The problem is that the guys they recruit will be weirdos like James Talarico. The rare masculine man they recruit will be like Platner, and thus too toxic for the party’s female voters.

The future of the Democratic Party is obviously female. Over 40 percent of its lawmakers in Congress are women. Over 60 percent of President Biden’s judicial appointees were female. Roughly 60 percent of Biden’s White House staff were women, as well as 56 percent of his senior staff. Congressional and DNC staff are also mostly women. The fairer sex is arguably the most important element to the Democratic coalition and the party consistently gets the majority of the female vote.

Women decide who represents the party and who doesn’t. Several prominent Democrats have been pushed out of office over frivolous MeToo claims. Al Franken resigned from the Senate after women were outraged over an old joke pic that emerged of him pretending to grope a sleeping woman. Andrew Cuomo had to resign as New York governor not over how he botched COVID, but over how he flirted with random women. He tried to make a comeback in the New York mayoral race last year, yet the MeToo allegations–along with other issues–helped sink him.

MeToo roiled liberal-dominated institutions. Hollywood, academia, and news media were the hardest hit by these accusations. While some of the behavior called out was certainly wrong and possibly criminal, much of it was directed at men for petty offenses, such as inept flirting or second thoughts over consensual sex. The new rules put in by female HR managers made it much harder for a man with solid T-levels to exist in these institutions. Asking a woman for a out drink could cost you your career and reputation. The only guys who could survive in this environment are the ones who would never take that risk, namely gay men and absolute herbs.

Just imagine the environment over the last decade for a young, straight white guy in Democratic politics. You’re constantly lectured about your privilege due to your race, gender, and sexual orientation. You’re passed over for jobs simply because of who you are. You live in mortal terror of the consequences of asking out the wrong girl or your ex deciding you’re an “abuser” because the relationship didn’t work out. It’s an extremely hostile environment where your identity is hated and you can’t assert yourself at all.

The normal guy would get the hell out of there. The ones who stay are James Talaricos.

Despite the media presenting Talarico as the most normal guy imaginable, he’s an extremely strange person. His past comments about loving trans kids would never come from a normal man. He’s been happy to accept inferior status as a white guy in the Democratic Party. He constantly apologizes for his whiteness. His strange voice and mannerisms prompted speculation he’s gay, which made his campaign publicize his girlfriend. However, the speculation remains.

Talarico is the only young white guy who could emerge from liberal politics now. There’s no space for regular dudes. Platner did not emerge from Democratic political operations. He’s never held office before. He’s just a charismatic guy who decided to run for Senate. If he had been professionally involved in liberal politics before, he would’ve been purged long ago.

Platner realizes that he needs to fit the mold of what liberals expect a man to be. He openly professes he loves therapy, calls out “toxic masculinity,” and says real men are “compassionate.” It’s probably not enough to make voters forget about the bad-boyfriend claims, but he at least knows what they want to hear.

Democrats realize they have to appeal to people outside the progressive base to win elections. They would love for “real men” to represent them in Congress to counter their overly feminine and woke image. But there’s hardly any real men among their millennial and Zoomer cohorts. The outsiders they find are liable to have the same baggage as Platner. It would take a very strange guy who presents as an uber chud to run as a progressive Democrat. It shouldn’t surprise us that Platner has these skeletons.

There’s still a fair number of normal white guys in the Democratic Party–but they’re pretty much all over 50. (Jon Ossoff could count as an exception in some people’s books.) They all want to run in 2028, and there’s a good chance one of them will be the nominee. But don’t expect any more from the next generation. They’re all going to be extremely weird like James Talarico and Pete Buttigieg.

Anyone else can’t make it in the modern Democratic Party. It’s the party of women and minorities. Straight, white guys sit at the back of the bus–until they need a candidate to win in battleground states.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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Hence, our fractured culture.

Conservative writer Aaron Renn blamed this development for the death of late-night TV in a recent essay. He offered a good summary of what we have lost:

One of the reasons our country features a lack of civic cohesion and a high level of political polarization is the fragmentation of our previous mass-media, mass-consumer common culture. This fragmentation resulted from new technologies, such as cable television and the internet, as well as structural economic changes that helped set the upper middle class apart from the rest of society.

…

There was a genuine national common culture in this world, in which Americans coast to coast shared at least some key cultural touchstones and references, even if there was along with this local and regional specific cultures as well. These might include TV shows like M*A*S*H, or news programs and personalities like Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News, or a late night talk show host like Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show on NBC.

This common culture had many upsides. It made us turn July 4th milestones into major celebrations. It produced memorable blockbusters and decent sitcoms. It allowed Americans to connect with one another through movie quotes and song choices. It gave us a sense of sharing something together.

There’s a lot of longing for this monoculture, especially among conservatives. It’s imagined as the Golden Age, even if the culture itself wasn’t particularly great or conservative. One sees this in the strange nostalgia for random parts of the 2000s—Blockbuster, shopping malls, and so on.

What’s overlooked are the many upsides to the monoculture’s demise. Its departure makes it far harder for the establishment to psyop the public into positions it wouldn’t otherwise take. This monoculture required Americans to conform to certain habits, tastes, and beliefs. It was mostly a gift for liberals. It helped make gay marriage acceptable and deluded America into thinking there was an epidemic of police shootings. On top of all this, many of its products weren’t that great. There were many horrible TV shows, songs, and movies we had to endure.

It’s good for a nation to have a common culture. But the one we had was past its expiration date. Our fractured age no longer allows such a thing to take hold.

Modern technology made the monoculture possible. TVs and radios connected millions of Americans, giving them access to the same information and entertainment regardless of where they lived. It broke down regional differences, cultural peculiarities, and prejudices. This development made many social movements more powerful than they would have been under the old paradigm.

The Civil Rights Revolution was televised, making it possible to achieve its goals in a way that was once impossible before TV. Millions of Americans watched horrible images of “peaceful” protesters being brutalized by racist policemen and Klansmen. They saw the articulate Martin Luther King Jr. present an appealing image of the movement. The reports and footage led the American mainstream to embrace the radical ends of the Civil Rights Movement, unaware that it would upend their own neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. It was hard for Americans to find out about the negative consequences of civil rights legislation. Their newspapers and magazines told them it would only fulfill American ideals. Hearing dissenting voices required much more effort when Americans were limited to a few channels and print outlets. Besides, the monoculture taught the public that only bigoted rubes opposed the Civil Rights Movement. A good citizen didn’t want to be like them. In their minds, the decent people were on the side of the civil rights marchers.

The monoculture’s grip on society was able to replay this scenario several times, especially with gay marriage. This idea, which was once a joke, became widely accepted thanks to TV shows and movies showing normal gay people who just wanted to “love one another.” Dissenting opinions were once again cast as the views of reactionary morons. To conform to polite society, Americans gave up their opposition to same-sex marriage.

Peak woke was the last hurrah of the monoculture. Americans began to have far more options for their entertainment and information in the 21st century. It was much easier to be into “weird” things such as anime and indie music in the 2010s. But the remnants of the monoculture were still able to exert themselves when it came to social attitudes. You could collect as much manga as you wanted, but you were still not allowed to criticize Black Lives Matter or “misgender” men pretending to be women.

Late-night TV and online news media reinforced these norms in the era of peak woke. While Americans were splitting apart in terms of what they watched and listened to, these forces were still able to wield a common culture around “proper beliefs.” Along with heavily censored social media platforms, they were able to whip up the public into fervors over a variety of left-wing fads. This included anti-Trump resistance, the George Floyd Revolution, COVID hysteria, and more.

But this turned out to be a last gasp of a fading force rather than a well-entrenched paradigm. Late-night TV and online news media are both in steep decline. It’s harder to enforce “proper beliefs” now. We are not going to have Michael Jackson’s insipid “Black or White” PSA song broadcast to nearly every American household anymore. A TV show can’t convince Americans to embrace the transgender cause anymore. It’s even difficult for journalists to cancel ordinary citizens for being “racist” anymore.

The old monoculture lives on in pro sports. It was always the least political element of the common culture. But we still see attempts to use it to push a particular message to the public. Pro sports teams are more eager to celebrate Pride Month than corporations. The NFL still displays BLM-inspired messages in end zones and on player helmets. The black national anthem is still played at the league’s marquee games. Fans thankfully ignore these efforts. They serve as a reminder of the bad aspects of the departed monoculture.

Our new fragmented culture allows right-wing and other dissenting views to flourish. The old dogmas are harder to maintain in an environment dominated by edgy memes and irreverent TikTok videos.

But it’s not all great.

This new environment also allows for a lot of insanity to thrive. You can now become a millionaire peddling the most unhinged conspiracy theories imaginable. It also engenders a hyper-atomized society that’s incapable of unity or even treating events with the seriousness they deserve. Witness how Charlie Kirk’s murder went from a national tragedy to a meme and a source for endless conspiracy theories after a month. It also explains why Americans can’t be bothered to go all-out for America’s 250th birthday. We’re stuck in our own cocoons and have little in common with our fellow citizens.

For all its faults, this is our culture now. The old monoculture is not coming back, nor should we long for it. It imposed a conformist liberalism on the masses, and its products weren’t even that great. For every classic movie, there was a trove of mediocre TV shows and movies alongside it. You now have the choice to cut through all this and watch what you want to watch.

That’s great for individual choice, but not so good for building social consensus.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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Freedom250, the Trump-aligned committee involved in celebrating the sesquicentennial, announced a concert series for its Great American State Fair. Music icons were promised to perform at the National Mall.

The lineup was far from anyone’s idea of music icons. Every artist has seen better days, with many of them now punchlines. Milli Vanilli is most famous for not actually singing their songs rather than for their music. Vanilla Ice, Young MC, and C+C Music Factory provided many great pump-up jams for elementary school gym classes in the ‘90s, but no one has seriously enjoyed their work since. Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, and Flo Rida still have some cultural clout, but their primes are well in the past. The same goes for the other performers. It was Hasbeenapalooza, but it was probably the best the administration could do. Your humble author, at least, was excited to see these acts share their art.

However, even the has-beens turned out to want nothing to do with Trump. Nearly every artist cancelled, claiming either they were misled or that the event was too divisive for them to perform at. The lineup was already embarrassing for Trump. The cancellations made the humiliation even worse. Only Vanilla Ice, a personal Trump friend, has confirmed his participation.

It’s a complete disaster for the administration, and there’s no way to recover from it. Granted, it’s just a concert series. Voters aren’t going to care that Milli Vanilli cancelled on Trump.

What it does represent is a definite sign that the much-discussed “vibe shift” in Trump’s favor is over. We aren’t back to peak woke—far from it. But the culture no longer wants anything to do with Trump.

The vibe shift was most evident after Trump’s 2024 election. Football players did the Trump dance to celebrate touchdowns and sacks. Big-name artists agreed to perform at inauguration events. Trump even got Carrie Underwood to sing at his swearing-in. Celebrities did not replay the full-on meltdown they had after his 2016 win. They made light-hearted jokes and many seemed at peace with his second term. He was endorsed by many of the country’s biggest podcasters. Trump was normalized in a way he had never been before.

Flash forward to now, and it’s a completely different story. Trump can’t even get Martina McBride—who endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004—to perform at a non-partisan event celebrating America’s birthday.

Pro athletes are no longer eager to associate themselves with Trump. New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart received massive backlash merely for introducing Trump at an event last month. It wouldn’t have been an issue in the spring of 2025. This probably explains why Fernando Mendoza, a conservative who clearly voted for Trump, didn’t want to meet with the president along with the rest of his national title team. Even though it’s customary for championship teams to meet with the president, Mendoza, the number one draft pick, probably didn’t want to risk his public reputation by shaking Trump’s hand. And this is a conservative athlete!

You’re unlikely to see many players doing the Trump dance after big plays this year. Amon-Ra St. Brown, one of the few players to do it during the 2025 NFL season, apologized for it. None of the players who did it during the 2024 season said sorry.

Nearly all the podcasters who helped Trump win the young male vote in 2024 have turned on him. Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, and Theo Von are now anti-Trump. Right-coded comedians like Shane Gillis are also vocally anti-Trump.

What happened to kill the vibe shift? I know my reply guys on X will have an answer. They will say it’s because Trump betrayed his base. If he had just deported 100 million immigrants, arrested all members of the Democratic Party, and gone to war against Israel rather than Iran, he would have every major artist lining up to perform at America 250. I expect to see at least five people unironically make that case in the comments.

Trump has become unpopular with the culture, but not for the same reasons given by my reply guys. It was clear that entertainers were cooling on Trump long before the Iran War. Joe Rogan and other brocasters turned on Trump over ICE raids. Last year’s strikes on Iran, the poor handling of the Epstein files, and the ICE shootings further depleted Trump’s cachet. The Iran War only made things worse, but it didn’t initiate the vibe shift’s reversal. A lot of factors are responsible, but Trump actually trying to deliver what he campaigned on—namely mass deportations—is what got the ball rolling.

Even if the economy were better and there was no Iran War, the vibe shift would probably still be over. A backlash was inevitable once Trump tried to implement what he campaigned on. The street battles in Newark over ICE raids demonstrate the strong opposition to full MAGA acceptance. The only way Trump could’ve maintained the vibe shift is if he had done no immigration raids at all. It was always going to be controversial to associate with Trump when he’s doing things that cultural tastemakers deem racist and “un-American.”

It also serves as a reminder of the difficulty of conservative cultural endeavors. “We need to create our own culture!” has been an incessant cry from the Right for years. It gets widely shared, creates lengthy discussions on how to achieve it, and inspires demands for Republican donors to shift their money from campaigns to cultural ventures. Everyone seems to think it’s a no-brainer that this strategy is the way to victory.

But the fiasco with the Great American State Fair demonstrates how these ideas turn out in reality. Conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh complain about the performers who were picked and insist we can find plenty of great artists who would love to play at the Fair. However, this lineup was the best the administration could expect. They were not going to get bigger names. It’s unclear what right-wingers want Trump to do here. He cannot use state power to force Bruce Springsteen, Metallica, and Billy Joel to perform. There are not a great number of conservative artists out there. Most artists lean left. Even the ones who lean right don’t want to harm their career prospects by being publicly associated with the Right. In any case, little can satisfy right-wing cultural demands. When TPUSA got big names for their halftime show, most of the Right complained about it because it wasn’t to their taste. But the MAGA base seemed to enjoy it.

The Daily Wire recently learned it’s a risky business to follow this dream. The conservative media company set out to produce its own TV shows and movies with high production values. But hardly anyone watched these shows and movies, and the effort nearly destroyed the company. While some of DW’s political content—such as Ben Shapiro’s show—has seen a decline in subscribers, the company’s real problems stem from its failed entertainment endeavors. The outlet set out to provide what conservatives repeatedly said they wanted—and it turned out that they didn’t actually want what was offered.

There’s a lot of talk about conservative cultural renewal, but as we see with the above-mentioned examples, there’s neither the talent nor the audience for it. As I wrote back in February, the base just wants mainstream culture with less wokeness and more red-state aesthetics. It’s why they love Taylor Sheridan’s subversive slop. It’s not overtly woke, and right-coded characters are the heroes—even if Sheridan spreads a libtard message through all of his works. Red staters will be okay with white privilege conversations so long as it comes from a badass cowboy. They don’t want an opera, a poetry reading, or anything else suggested by the culture renewers.

The conservatives clamoring for more right-wing culture can’t even figure out what they want. They hate DW’s movies, the TPUSA halftime show, and the America 250 concert series. But they don’t have any alternatives to offer. It’s probably better to focus on politics and cultural commentary instead of continuing to fantasize about conservative cultural creation.

Especially with the vibe shift’s death.

It’s not as bad for Trump and the Right as it was during the first administration. We aren’t seeing random people fired from their jobs or doxed simply for being Trump supporters. It’s easier to wear a MAGA hat in public today than it was in 2018. Social media itself is far more right-wing, and the news media is less capable of policing “wrongthink” than in the era of peak woke.

But the vibe shift is finished.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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However ridiculous this nostalgia may seem, it’s genuinely felt. This is the America many people, particularly millennials, want back.

Sometimes the cultural nostalgia latches on to more understandable items. A patriotic 1976 Coke ad went viral last week for showcasing an idyllic America. Mainstream conservatives and right-wing shitposters loved the soda commercial showing a mostly white town with parades, baseball, and happy Americans celebrating the Bicentennial. The ad was contrasted with the apparently dark situation of today. “The past is America. We are now living in a foreign country,” read one typical response on X.

But the clip is not a documentary. It’s an advertisement. Obviously, it depicts an idealized version of life rather than what’s really going on. One would hopefully not rely on ads today to understand what life is like. Otherwise, you would think 80 percent of American couples today are interracial, with the majority being a white husband and black wife.

Kevin Deanna noted the strange way Americans perceive their past. “1976 Coca-Cola ad is being taken as proof of the decline of patriotism just as that 1980s Gillette ad was taken as proof of the death of masculinity,” the right-wing writer posted on X. “We can’t even interpret our decline except through pop culture and commercial advertisements.”

He makes a good point, and it can be expanded to support the notion that Americans can’t interpret who we are except through pop culture and commercial advertisements. This explains why far more Americans, including right-wingers, feel the loss of Blockbuster on a deeper level than the loss of Confederate statues. There’s a more personal connection to the video rental chain than the monuments to long-dead ancestors.

There are a lot of reasons to feel a sense of loss at the current state of America. The Anglo-Protestant people and values that built this country are in decline. Immigrants from every corner of the world can now be found in the heartland. Much of that heartland is filled with ghost towns and drug abuse. Even with woke’s retreat, our schools, universities, and even many of our corporations still spread anti-white racism. Fewer Americans know our history or even care about its heritage. Our country looks a lot less like the America of our grandparents, both demographically and culturally.

The strange nostalgia fueling the Right’s cultural pessimism is a favorite Highly Respected topic. What seems to really move people to despair–more than removed statues or forgotten Anglo norms–are these commercial memories. There’s the obvious explanation that these people actually experienced those enterprises more than the Founding or the Civil War, and so they’re naturally more attached to them.

But there are two other things going on here. One is that millennials’ intense nostalgia reflects their shattered illusions as adults and their desire to return to childhood. The second is how pop culture now serves as the heritage for Americans. We’re a people that proudly dispense with the past. What heritage the individual American is primarily attached to, beyond their own experiences, is commercial memories. That animates the strange cultural pessimism of our time.

Millennials are not a popular generation. While boomers are more hated, boomers at least like themselves. That’s debatable with millennials, as many try to adopt a different generational identity. They’re hated by the young as lame uncs and by the old as ungrateful snowflakes. Millennials are defined by arrested development. Far more of this generation aren’t hitting adult benchmarks of home ownership and marriage than prior generations. Zoomers may exceed them, but Gen Z doesn’t have the same expectations as millennials. Millennials bought into the classic American Dream that if they work hard and do everything right, they’ll be amply rewarded. In adulthood, they learned that wasn’t true. The Great Recession and COVID wrecked millennial job prospects, finances, and socialization. Many millennials point to these events to explain why they didn’t achieve the American Dream they expected simply for doing their homework. Zoomers, on the other hand, don’t have these assumptions and have acclimated to the new America.

Millennials dwell on their childhoods because that’s the time when their dreams still lived and the world made more sense. It’s why they are so attached to Blockbuster, Toys ‘R’ Us, and videos of high schoolers from the George W. Bush era. This was before their expectations were crushed by the realities of 21st century adulthood.

Many desire a return to childhood but know that’s frowned upon by society. So some turn to political explanations for why they want Blockbuster and 2007 high school back. This is where things get absurd and these places are extolled as exemplifying rooted, organic communities. One apparently found a real identity in the McDonald’s ball pit. Others insist that they pine for these failed stores because they represent a time when it was safe to shop. Apparently, one can no longer leave one’s house without being murdered anymore (don’t compare the murder rates between now and the ‘90s/2000s).

These justifications for nostalgia are ridiculous and provide no serious basis for a right-wing worldview. But it makes sense why millennials long for their adolescence. It was a better time for many of them.

But millennial longing isn’t the only explanation for our curious form of nostalgia. It’s also how we interpret our heritage and our past through commercial memories. The past is literally a foreign country to Americans. The majority don’t feel a deep connection to our history and imagine it involves different people rather than their ancestors. For recent immigrants, this is true. But it also applies to Heritage Americans.

You’ll notice this in the South. Southerners are not like Germans who feel immense ancestral guilt for what their predecessors did. Modern Southerners will often act like it was some other people who practiced slavery and Jim Crow, not anyone they’re related to. This is mostly a good thing because it blocks the imposition of self-hatred and the feeling that they owe reparations. At the same time, it allows southerners to separate themselves from their past.

Most Americans are like this. Despite being more patriotic than other developed countries, only three percent of Americans say our history makes them proud. Normie Americans shrug their shoulders at finding out their family has been here since the 17th century. Revolutionary War ancestors are as relevant to them as their medieval peasant ancestors. They’re focused on the here and now. What matters to them are the only family members that were around in their lifetime. But even their experiences don’t weigh heavily on them. White millennials and zoomers have pretty much all forgotten how their parents and grandparents were forced out of cities and many public schools following the Civil Rights Revolution. The only historical memory that remains strong is World War II, an event kept in the public consciousness by an endless supply of films and video games.

The majority of Americans don’t grow up being inculcated with a direct connection to the American past. They’re not learning Civil War songs, stories from their ancestors, or any kind of specific group identity from their family or school. Anything that happened before their time is ancient history–unless it’s a fun conspiracy theory shared by their favorite podcaster. Of course, there are still people who care about this history, but it’s a minority–and it’s increasingly older.

What stands in the place of heritage is our mass culture, as I explained in an article two years ago:

[W]e have a new mythos that’s replaced actual history. Marvel, Star Wars, and other popular franchises serve as our reference points for world affairs. When the Ukraine War broke out, many commentators explained the conflict through the lens of The Avengers. Harry Potter references were frequently deployed by politicians and media outlets to showcase the alleged evil of the Trump administration. Past political leaders utilized allusions from the Bible, classical works, and American history to illustrate their points to the public. Now our leaders cite Spider-Man and Voldemort. World War II is the only historical event most Americans are familiar with due to its inclusion in comic book films and video games. The Nazis stand as the ultimate bad guys in American mythology–our countrymen just might not know which country they ruled.

This new national character makes it much easier for immigrants to assimilate. They no longer need to turn themselves into Anglos who revere the Founding Fathers. They just need to enjoy working and watch our favorite shows. That’s about it.

There are upsides to this. We recoil at collective guilt projects because we insist that individuals today aren’t tainted by the alleged sins of the past. We’re too optimistic and forward-thinking for the guilt cults that dominate Germany, Canada, and other countries to take deep root here. Only the most libtarded Americans feel bad over white privilege.

But it also creates a bizarre public memory and shared heritage. Star Wars and the NFL make for a rather shallow national identity. But that’s what our people are attached to, and that’s why this strange nostalgia pervades social media. It also partially explains the decline in patriotism. Chain stores are likely to inspire deep reverence.

There’s still the opportunity to awaken a sense of identity based on America’s heritage rather than its pop culture. But it will take time and a lot of effort to do so.

Until then, expect millennials to keep posting about the McDonald’s ball pit and picking up The Lion King to rent. We can only hope Zoomers don’t do the same nostalgia posting about Fortnite in the 2030s.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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One would think this would be greeted with joy and hailed as a sign the Trump administration is delivering law and order. But you would be mistaken. My post sharing the news was DELUGED with outraged X users. Many Americans, particularly right-wingers, strongly believe crime has never been higher. Any evidence saying otherwise is fake. The only reason we have fewer murders is because of medical advances. We have more violence than ever before though.

These opinions would have had merit just a few years ago. Following the George Floyd Revolution, America experienced an unprecedented surge in crime. Murder rates skyrocketed all over the country, with many cities surpassing previous records. All kinds of horrible crimes proliferated, from carjackings to mass looting. And it was all allowed by the politicians who felt it was worse to arrest criminals than the crimes committed. Racial sensitivity took precedence over public safety. When liberals were confronted with this reality, they then tried to blame COVID rather than Black Lives Matter and soft-on-crime policies.

Many still believe this is the situation today. That’s no longer the case. Crime has gone down across the board, as illustrated in the murder rate. There wasn’t a sudden medical breakthrough in 2023 that accounts for the murder drop. Non-fatal shootings have also plummeted since the early 2020s. There are a number of scandals involving police fudging the numbers but it’s extremely difficult to hide murders. Additionally, the National Crime Victimization Survey, which relies on different data from that of the FBI and is less beholden to official manipulation, found a dramatic drop in crime after 2023. Even a hellhole like Memphis has seen a substantial drop in violent crime in part due to Trump’s surge of troops and federal law enforcement to the city.

Total crime could be worse now than it was in the mid-2010s. From personal experience, DC and a few other cities do feel worse than how they were a decade ago. But America is less deadly, and we are far less prone to race riots than we were a decade ago.

We do have fewer murders now thanks to medical advances. But this has been a factor for nearly 40 years. The lethality of shootings in the country has remained roughly the same since the late 1980s. It even had a minor bump in the early 2020s, which would further debunk the notion that the only reason we have fewer murders now is due to better medical care. The real medical breakthroughs happened in the wake of the Vietnam War, not during the Obama administration. That’s not to say we haven’t gotten better over the last 40 years. It’s just that the chances for a stabbing or shooting victim to survive were already much better during the height of our murder wave than they were in 1960.

We have fewer murders now because we have fewer aggravated assaults. Any other explanation misses the big picture.

It’s an objective fact that crime is down from the early 2020s and is far lower than what it was in the ‘90s. But our crime rate is still significantly higher than that of Europe and the rest of the developed world. It’s still a problem for us, even if it’s relatively better than at any point in recent history.

Why is the Right so upset with this basic fact? One is due to the misunderstanding that the post-Floyd crime wave persists today. That’s no longer the case, as amply demonstrated above.

Another reason is that thanks to smartphones and social media, we’re more aware of individual crimes than we were 30 years ago. We now see horrors like Iryna Zarutska’s stabbing with our own eyes. The same goes with teen takeover and other criminal activity. But more videos of crime doesn’t mean more crime. We live in a society where everything is surveilled and people can instantly share clips of assaults and stabbings. If you spend any amount of time on RW Twitter, you’ll see these videos constantly. Even normies see this stuff on Instagram and TikTok. But this is just a sign of how crime is better documented today. The bloodshed of the 80s and ‘90s was reflected in body bags away from the public eye. But people who lived at that time certainly felt the danger of crime. It’s how Bill Clinton was able to get a bipartisan crime bill through Congress–with the support of black lawmakers. It’s unthinkable to imagine black lawmakers doing the same today. That’s how bad the crime was.

What may be the ultimate reason for the disbelief in declining crime is ideological hang-ups. Many right-wingers think modern America is an absolute hellhole. It’s never been more dangerous than today. We can’t even shop anymore, which is why we no longer have Blockbuster or Toys R Us (yes, people unironically tell me this). Back in the day, we didn’t even have drug addicts on the street (don’t look up the crack epidemic). Now they’re everywhere. This is why America needs radical solutions, such as what Nayib Bukele has done in El Salvador.

Being informed that America is now much safer upsets this view. Instead of reflecting on that, they retreat to their own bubble and grasp for any way to disprove the crime decline. They seem to think their worldview would be discredited by accepting the facts before them.

But that’s a mistake. Our crime decline is driven by factors that liberals would be repelled by.

The two big reasons for the decline are demographics and tough-on-crime measures. Criminologist Barry Latzer explained the demographic causes in the Wall Street Journal in 2022. At that time, crime was out of control and it seemed America may be returning to the dark days of the early ‘90s. But Latzer disagreed. He noted that crime rose after the 1960s for a variety of reasons:

large-scale rural-to-urban migration of African-Americans and immigration to big cities of Hispanic populations with high violent-crime rates, massive growth in the youth population, and a weak criminal-justice system. One might throw in a fourth: The crack-cocaine epidemic, which sent crime soaring after it began to ease in the early ’80s.

But all four factors have substantially changed over the last 40 years. The black population is now remarkably older and less concentrated in urban areas than it was in the past. The gentrifiers who pushed them out commit far less crime than they do, as do the immigrants who have also replaced them. The justice system was made much stronger thanks to federal and state laws passed since the 1970s. The crack epidemic was thankfully curtailed in the ‘90s. We still have drug problems but it now causes more deaths of despair than violent crime.

Latzer basically argued that the decline and dispersal of the native-born black American (NBA) population contributed to America’s increasing safety.

The surge in crime in the early 2020s, which upended long-term trends, largely owed to cities and some states giving up on the policies that restored public safety after the bloody crack epidemic. While not all officials realized their errors, many mayors and district attorneys did and quietly restored these policies in response to the crime surge. Unsurprisingly, actually enforcing the law reduced crime.

An additional factor that contributed to the disorder of the Biden era was the flood of illegals who came here. Trump’s immigration crackdown has sent many of these criminals home.

To reiterate, tough-on-crime policies and black decline made America safer. If anything, this vindicates a right-wing worldview.

We still have many problems in this country, such as mass immigration and anti-white racism. There are other forbidden truths the media and education system hide from the people, such as our horrific crime rates following the Civil Rights Revolution and George Floyd’s death. It’s stupid to share in those delusions just so we can imagine we’ve never had worse crime than we do now.

It’s just not true.

You can now preorder Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.

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I wrote an article for The American Conservative on how this mindset prevents us from doing anything about the debt:

America’s debt topped 100 percent of our national GDP last month, marking a grim milestone for the nation. “We’re headed toward uncharted territory,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told the Wall Street Journal. “There’s no magic of 100 percent vs. 99 percent, but it’s a scary place to be.”

The disturbing news wasn’t greeted with much concern. Upon reflection, that’s not very surprising. The debt has been increasing exponentially for years without the average America feeling the effects. People simply don’t care about it much anymore. With the exception of some libertarians in Congress and at think tanks, it’s been a long time since even conservatives obsessed over the debt clock.

But it remains an obvious problem. Rising debt can lead to an inflation spike and cause other economic ailments. But don’t expect Americans to do anything about it any time soon. To deal with the debt would require sacrifice among ordinary citizens. There’s very little chance of that happening in our sacrifice-averse nation. In order to secure votes, politicians will likely do more to increase the debt than reduce it. They know they’d lose their seats if they ever pushed the cuts necessary to get America’s fiscal house in order.

Read the rest here.

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