The world has changed tremendously since I was a child. I remember hearing my parents bemoaning the future that I would one day live in; now that day is here, and I find myself asking the same questions about the world my daughter will live in.
If ideas fall along a linear spectrum, the “Overton window” is the part of that spectrum that includes society’s popularly acceptable ideas. Without a doubt, that window has been moving leftward so quickly it could sling Marty McFly into the future.
If you need evidence, look no further than one of the most powerful corporations in America: Disney.
A Disney producer can depict Republican children being shredded by a woodchipper without any reprimand, but a conservative Disney actress is fired for posting a warning about the dangers of dehumanizing people.
This is a common theme in the modern era. Ilhan Omar can repeat anti-Semitic tropes without fear of reprisal, Governor Northam can wear blackface, James Gunn can post pedophilic tweets, Sarah Jeong can use explicit anti-white racism and be defended by her employer (The New York Times), but a rodeo clown who wears an Obama mask in his performance loses his job.
To make the situation worse, the greatest of leftist misdeeds is suppressed by the press, “fact checkers” regularly place fingers on the scale, and tech giants modify algorithms to keep people away from inconvenient facts or to steer them away from certain ideas.
We have gotten to the point where we can barely defend the fact that biological males should not be allowed to use their greater strength and bone density to pulverize females in women’s sports. Before long, we won’t even be able to protect children from life-altering hormone injections and genital mutilation.
One thing is for sure: What we’ve been doing isn’t working.
Whatever gains we have made have been mediocre in comparison to what we’ve lost, and so many of our institutions are stacked against us that it appears to some to be conspiracy.
Perhaps they’re right—but not in the way they think.
It’s a conspiracy of our own making; we’ve conspired to our own detriment. We’ve placed all of our efforts into politics for whatever short-term gains we could get and abandoned all other fields while knowing full well that, as Andrew Breitbart said years ago, “politics is downstream from culture.”
Yet no matter how much we lose and how much our politicians disappoint us, we never seem to change our tactics.
We’ve given up so much of the culture that now it will take a great deal of sacrifice to rescue it. In order to do so, we need to be prepared to take serious, personal losses.
Our Founding Fathers pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to the cause of liberty. If liberty is to survive, that is what we must now do. We must give our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor fully to developing a generation with conservative values and a passion for liberty.
The current culture is all but lost; but we, for the moment, have the ability to develop a new one. Instead of just pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into major political races, we should be pouring those dollars into academia, high-quality conservative schools, media, arts, and technology.
We need to shift our priorities and our vocations so we spend more time molding the minds of children into those with strong moral values and a passion for liberty.
There is no room for half measures. We must be committed fully, or we will lose everything—not just for us, but for our children and every subsequent generation.
Reagan was right: “Liberty is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Let it not die on our watch.
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