A Nation Bud Lighted
Fear And Politics
A line from Shakespeare's Hamlet is relevant:
There's been a whole lot of to thine own self be untrueness going around, and I think we should all put a stop to it. We remember the minor cultural earthquake of the Bud Light Event of 2023, wherein an advertising VP at Budweiser thought, based on her view of the cultural state of America, that it would be a good idea to support transgenderism by producing an advertising segment to be posted by one Dylan Mulvaney (on April Fools Day, I kid you not), who is a transgender, either real or fake, no one seems to know for sure. Sales dropped off big time and did not bounce back after a month or two as usually happens, and the drop off was blamed on out of the mainstream conservatives fomenting a boycott. That was the whistling in the dark of the usual suspects who didn't want to think that there take on culture was wrong. (Except for those for whom it was just about money.)
https://people.com/bud-light-controversy-everything-to-know-7547159
We are assured by People that it's the reactionary conservatives who called for a boycott that caused their sales to tank, intolerant people who are still in the middle ages, but I've thought it probably had more to with the true culture. There is the true culture as it is, and the perceived culture, the culture as seen through the filters of media, or maybe it's better to say that there are many variations of the true culture, but it always differs from the perceived many variations of the true culture. Sure, conservatives complained, but in the real world people often just didn't want to be seen drinking it, especially since there were lots of alternatives, and there are people who actually don't want their children's lives destroyed.
I think the whole country is experiencing another Bud Light moment, but this time concerning the whole deep state and the corrosive culture being foisted upon us. In fact it might be that part of the success of Trump's operation is his recognition of the true culture, which is giving him support. Recognition that the purpose of DEI is to institutionalize leftism is creeping in, since those hired due to DEI usually lean left. What better way to assure that institutions all over the country, from education to medicine to government, are stacked with the “right” kind of people than to have a system that discriminates against everyone else?
All manner of left wing ideas are similarly passing away, albeit slowly, such as women wanting to raise their own children rather than working all day in a cubicle. Maybe it’s just a sort of swing back and forth, a long term societal oscillation.
(In furtherance of one's continued study of propaganda, one might read the People link above, and maybe the similarly biased Wikipedia article below. I would consider both articles to be examples of the third and fourth rules of propaganda; The rule of transfusion - manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends, and The rule of unanimity - presenting one's viewpoint as if it were unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: draining the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure , and by 'psychological contagion'.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Light_boycott
But all of this is not what this essay is really about, it's about untruthfulness in organizations, the tendency to try to appear ideologically pure relative to what they see as the culture, while having no such ideological beliefs of their own. It's all about the bottom line, The point of the Bud Light Event of 2023 is that they generally don't even know what the culture is like, and they should not make an effort to appear ideological. We just want your beer, not your virtue signalling, so just go back to telling us the beer is good. They are manifestly not to their own selves being true.
The two articles referenced above appear to reflect the perceived culture, the one where most everyone is happy with transgenderism and disdainful of those who aren't. Do the writers truly think that way? Do they really think most people want their children turned into homosexual Communists with missing body parts and an inability to produce grand children? Inquiring minds want to know, but it's a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Or maybe it's about all of those children not being able to produce children in the future, from those who think they should play God and kill off most of the population for it’s own good. (See the series written by Bianca Kennedy on depopulation, starting here with part 1:)
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that much of what we take for trends going on in the world is really just people trying to keep out of trouble. If the king says that the moon is made of green cheese you might risk beheading if you say it's made of rock. In his book Homage to Catalonia George Orwell remarked about how, when he first arrived in Spain signs, symbols and various indications of support for Communism were everywhere, and festooning the fronts of businesses. After the political situation changed they mostly just disappeared.
"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Recently the owner of the Washington Post, one Jeff Bezos, instituted a change in policy regarding the editorial page, deciding to emphasize individual freedom and free markets, thereby leaving his employees gasping for air at his swing to the fascism of personal freedom and free markets. (How many of them can define the word “fascism.” They may or may not have used the word “fascism,” but it's used to describe anyone not down with the swing to a world wide socialist nightmare.)
DEI is disappearing from corporate culture, probably meaning that they weren't really for it to begin with, it was just the thing to do. They weren't true to their own selves, and probably aren't now.
The rapid changes we're seeing now are not as surprising as one might think. The support for a bloated and corrupt government bureaucracy and the wokeism that supported it was never really so strong outside of those getting rich. Remember the words of JFK.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ John F. Kennedy
Stay Brave, Stay Free
"Do they really think most people want their children turned into homosexual Communists with missing body parts and an inability to produce grand children?" I'm not sure what they think; I suspect they care more for their virtue-signaling personas, than - perhaps - anything else. They live in a bubble and want to please their bubble brethren.
Such an excellent article! And thank you for the cross post...much appreciated!
The decades-long conditioning of many Western civilization populations has done more damage to our countries than any kinetic war could do. And it was all by design, following the playbook for "color revolutions," but turning them inward to our own citizen populations, rather than foreign enemies.
There are still so many millions of people who have been conditioned, in a slow but methodical fashion, to accept the continuous moving of the cultural goal posts, through their exposure to state-sponsored arts, music, television, books, and films. I think if these people ever learn the real reason for this cumulative subversion of our culture, traditions, and norms, propagated in the guise of tolerance, they would likely reconsider their propagandized beliefs and may just start to realize that they need to become intolerant of cultural wars fostered for the purpose of destabilizing societies, which make them ripe for globalist, communist takeovers in their governments. These people might just take up the "To thine own self be true" doctrine.