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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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The recent Superbowl halftime kerfuffle exposed me to some of the culture I usually don't pay much attention to; that being Country, reggaeton ,hiphop, and popular music in general. I don't really pay much attention to that side of the culture war, I'm too busy being an elitist piece of shit about music.

I saw the halftime show of course; the music was kinda boring and derivative IMO but you could dance to it, I've heard worse. The show itself was spectacular, a celebration of people doing people shit, dancing and working and getting married and having kids and living in the house you grew up in, all that good good shit I like.

Due to my circle, I also watched the TPUSA half time show. I'll discount the production because they didn't have infinity million dollars to do it and just consider the theming: Half hearted nostalgia for a past with no character and no value (infinite jihad on kid rock), shitty white versions of black music with no soul and no heart, country music whining about how hard it is, it's so sad you guys.

Upon survey of the major hits of the two most popular opposing genres (Hiphop and country, not to say there aren't communist folk singers or MAGA rappers), this kinda repeats: there are the brainless two chord songs about how much the lead singer is fukin and how good he is at it but also he is sad and relatable because he just wants to find love, maaaaaaaan (eg. 20 cigarettes); we will set those aside for the more political - aspirational - gesturing at a revolutionish songs.

I got some recs. from people who partake and I had AI slop me out a list of such songs for the right and the left over the past couple years, and the trend seems to hold: The right-pol songs are reactive, kinda dour, "I don't like how things are going, it's hard, we need to defend XYZ, try that in a small town", etc.

The left-pol songs are also "shits fucked up, but black this time" but the prominent themes are "Those rat bastards are going to get what they deserve, We are the inevitable victors of history and every setback is temporary, We're gonna be alright".

I wonder where the Bush era triumphal conservative art movement has gotten off to, Am I Berenstein Bears-ing myself into believing that there was a big swell of positive conservative leaning pop art in the post 9/11 pre-2008 crash days?

Those rat bastards are going to get what they deserve, We are the inevitable victors of history and every setback is temporary, We're gonna be alright".

Leftist music was always kind of antiestablishment, revolutionary and disruption coded. The modern paradox is, that many of these themes are kind of right coded nowadays. Rage against the machine and and their Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me refrain from Killing in the Name was quite popular for COVID-19 anti-lockdowns crowd to great dismay of band members themselves. I saw similar movement from some punk celebrities which also moved over to mocking progressives as cultural hegemons.

I'd say that it is both. In general all the movements have the element where the enemy is immensely powerful and evil and he destroyed everything that we hold dear, and our future is on knife edge - which sounds whiney. But at the same time the enemy is also stupid and uncultured and prone to conspiratory thinking, so we must mobilize to mock and beat him. So the culture reflects both sides of the propaganda. For conservatives there is the whole religious leg, which literally says that everything is gonna be all right, Jesus himself promised us that no matter how bad it gets, the faithful will prevail in the end.

From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:

Let’s face it – being on the right is tough these days. The left has completed its long march through the institutions – media, academia, technology, government bureaucracy – and stands dominant in all of them. Through these, they have come to utterly dominate not only much of public policy and the mainstream news media, but also to act as arbiters of the mainstream culture as well. As Mencius Moldbug noted, in the Modern state, culture is downstream from politics, and public morals are set by whoever’s army is guarding the television station. Through their machinery of cultural control, the establishment left (which is by no means antiwar or against police statism on principle) has manufactured consent on all manner of issues. Not only that, they’ve created and sustained a culture of leftism – the propagation, whether explicitly presented as such or not, of leftist memes, not the least important of which is leftism as hip and intellectual.

This leftist culture has become the absolutely dominant mainstream culture in not just the United States, but all of the West. And there’s no hope of changing it anytime soon – not with the mainstream academic and media cartels enjoying the legal protections (not to mention the favor of much of the political system) that they do. And where does that leave the right? It leaves it in a position that’s…

…well, that’s a hell of a lot of fun, actually. Because we are the counterculture now. For the left, in all of its dominance of establishment culture, has now run into what I call Bakunin’s Corollary to Flair’s Law.

Flair’s Law states: To be The Man, you’ve got to beat The Man.

Bakunin’s Corollary states: Once you do beat The Man, then you become The Man, whether you said you were going to or not.

And as it stands now, the left most definitely is The Man. Not only that, but they act the part, down to the smallest detail. A more moralizing, censorious, hectoring, endlessly instructive bunch of tut-tutting know-it-all pearl-clutchers you could not find anywhere. The left, long ago, when they were out of power, once understood the sheer joy of sticking a thumb in the eye of people like that. They understood both the necessity and the power of creating a counterculture. Now it is time for the right, and especially the alternative right – all manner of traditionalists, reactionaries, right-libertarians, separatists, monarchists, and elitists – to drop out of the establishment mass popular culture and work on creating a counterculture of our own. Not just because it is necessary in order to maintain and pass on our values in the face of the ceaseless onslaught of that leftist popular culture (Note that there is increasingly nothing – nothing – in popular culture that is permitted to be happily apolitical; to not incessantly parrot the left’s memes. Not television, not comedy, not music, not video games, not football or basketball, not web browsers or search engines, not even chicken sandwiches or hamburgers), but because it’s just plain fun.

You are the counterculture now. You get to flip the bird to The Man, to be anti-establishment, to get off the grid of pop-culture garbage and live the way you see fit. Those of the alternative right are not just in the positions of being the Marxes and Nietzsches and Gramscis opposed to bourgeois mass-culture morality, but we also get to be Kerouac in San Francisco, to be Wyatt and Billy on the open highway, to be Ken Kesey on his Magic Bus, to be Lenny Bruce making people faint from the stage.

Nearly everything necessary for this is already in place. In many ways, the alternative right community reminds me of my father’s descriptions of Greenwich Village circa 1964. It is filled with all manner of eccentrics and thinkers and radicals and rebels and misfits. Some speak deep truths, some seem half-crazy; some are charismatic and charming, others seem scary and dangerous. Sometimes it is the scary, dangerous, and half-crazy among them who speak the most deep truth. All throughout, there is a feeling of throwing off what the establishment gives us, of finding a better way. There is also a feeling that something big is inevitable, and coming sooner rather than later.

How exciting!

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