The Culture War Is Won Viscerally

Most people, human nature, really, is won by emotions, not reason.

I’m sorry to break this to you, but if mass hysteria was not a thing and people didn’t rely on trust (a feeling) in a President, a bunch of logical people would never have worn masks and let the two weeks to flatten the curve analogy drive them out of business, homes and food.

We are still being impacted by the visceral pandemic response of 2020. When you look at our entire economy know this: nothing ever changes in a mere four years. The damages of a bad economic decision like shutting down the economy and telling everyone to stop working for 6 months may take a decade to realize completely.

Society fucked up based on emotional reactions, visceral reactions to Trump for or against. The right by just going along with him through the pandemic based on trust. The left by insisting Trump wasn’t governing us hard enough through the pandemic.

The left had a strong visceral reaction to Trump. It radicalized them. It made them not shuck off his governance but rather, demand more. “Trump did not lock us down hard enough” and furthermore, “everything we hate so much about Trump, we project onto the entire right” who in general are still bending over backwards even today for the left.

The right is presently being radicalized by their visceral reaction to Biden, but it’s slower. It’s very slow. He’s old, he’s frail, and probably by design, he’s hard to be mad at. He’s someone we feel sorry for. We are mad at the invisible shadow government that is pulling his levers and propping him up for press conference after press conference of Weekend At Biden’s. It’s hard to be rapidly radicalized by a husk.

The right still needs more time.

If your entire message is one of radicalization, notice how you respond viscerally to Kamala Harris. How do you feel when you see a door where people have her campaign signs up already along side a sign that states “No Hate Lives Here” over a rainbow colored list of people they don’t hate, and on that list, you are not included. Imagine having to deliver your neighbor’s lost package to that door knowing as a right wing, possibly Christian value based person, the world has never seen as much hate as what the person behind this door feels toward you right now if you are “out of the closet” about who you are. If you don’t feel nervous or terrified, you don’t understand your enemy yet. Or you are just another lying-to-yourself-Libertarian (anarchist…) who still believes we can all get along if we just look the other way while they cut out their children’s genitals (and your children’s eventually if they continue to get their way).

I firmly believe it will take at least four more years for the right to unravel their apologetic, reasonable programming to defend their tolerance of the left’s bullshit and to see true radicalization toward the preservation of the border, of children’s genitals and innocence, of the economy, of bodily sovereignty from medicalization and all the other things they care about. Maybe part of the problem is that what we want, when stated plainly doesn’t seem radical. But it must become so, in contrast to the Sodom and Gomorrah we are living through.

I know you have a visceral response to what’s going on right now. You want to stop the bleeding immediately. If only we could just give Trump four more years to ban more guns, to implement more equity hires to appease the left, to try to bend us toward the middle or toward Israel, to get us to stop farming and kill off our own herd for the greater good and to do absolutely fuck all about immigration. That’s the reality. But I get the wishing and hoping it could be different or he could be different than who he has shown us that he is from the last time he was elected. I know because I feel it, too. This hope that he’d make all the nonsense go away.

But the truth is that most of that nonsense is going away now in a massive pushback the likes of which the right has not seen in recent times: the bump stock bans implemented by Trump revoked, the farmers protesting government meddling, the DEI being unraveled in multiple companies nationally, the distrust in vaccines and medicine and the awareness about the border situation in the wake of Kamala’s responses on the topic. None of which did Trump lift a finger to fix, if anything, which he greatly exacerbated.

If you believe that radicalization comes from defending Trump while he supports Israel, shucks off good advisors for bad ones (chronically speaking, past being precedent), fills the swamp with people who hate us, initiates more gun bans, gets all the boomers to take more vaccines (most of them did the last time, btw) yada yada yada, I have an ice chest to sell Eskimos.

But if you get the reality of the situation and you are fully radicalized, look around. You may be a fully baked right radical, but your neighbors are not just yet.

And if you can’t stomach four more years to finish this cake because you can’t stand the heat coming off your visceral reaction to Kamala and rainbow flags and unbridled immigration, you aren’t strong enough for what needs to be done. This cake needs more time to bake. The economy can and must stand four more years of radicalizing the right via a leftist administration. Resist the urge to pull the cake out before it’s done.

Real radicalization takes visceral reactions over and over again to what is happening, and all hopium does is delay that radicalization from taking place. Stop listening to your tiny echochamber of fellow radicals and pay attention to the larger right who is still defending their tolerance. Still tolerating the mutilation of children’s genitals and an unbridled immigrant invasion hoping Trump will intercede on their behalf. They’re not done.

We need them MAD.

At this moment, the right feels annoyed but sympathetic because they think they are going to win with an easy Trump election, and all the leftist’s dreams are about to come crashing down. The left are (particularly after the assassination attempt) the underdogs here. At least, that’s the way right still sees things. That’s the problem. The right does not see that the left are still getting most of us to have respectful conversations with them while they get to dehumanize us. The right doesn’t see that they are the underdogs, remaining steadfastly defensive of their tolerance of the left. The right are victimized while seeking this impossible unity, a fabrication of the left. When the left offers or suggests unity, it’s via assimilation and ultimately death. They will never truly accept you, no matter how much you apologize to them for ever being out of the closet you. They want you deep into that closet and once you are, they intend to light that closet on fire.

For those of us already radicalized, we must observe our visceral reactions with mindfulness. We don’t want to rush this process or be rash in such a way as to promote people too much who will push our right wing friends back into their comfort zone.

Rather we must promote the values, not the people, not the figureheads, but values and culture we would like to elevate throughout this ordeal. When your friends visit you from nutso lands where they are still tolerating nonsense, we must show them what it’s like to live somewhere that the traffic isn’t slowed down to a stop from illegal immigration. We must show them where churches support local communities with harmony. We must show them where it’s safe to walk in the middle of the downtown at midnight. We must show them the American dream of right wing families populating neighborhoods with kids still being kids. We must make this so far contrasting from their normal that they can’t tolerate their left wing, wrongheaded, backwards paradise of hedonism anymore.

There is a divide in America. It’s an unfathomable chasm between right and wrong. Until the right fully embraces this, we will not be free.

Let them be cake.