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Cultural Winners and Losers of 2019
As we end another year, our popular culture still revolves around President Donald Trump, and our news and entertainment conglomerates continue to be outraged that conservative Christians stick with him, so much so they are summarily ignored. Support him as, say, Franklin Graham and a vast majority of evangelicals have done and … crickets. But what happens when evangelicals don’t?
Happy days are here again. The left has lunged to promote an editorial by Christianity Today magazine that insists Trump must be removed from office. What the left understands — and some on the right still ignore — is that the cultural is far more powerful than the political. Thus, whenever a force on the cultural left flaps its wings, it is saluted. In the rare occasion that the entity advances the cultural right, it’s slammed, or ignored.
But that’s not necessarily how America sees it, thanks to social media that has done an end run around the press and told the truth. The left still dominates in the cultural space, but it no longer enjoys a monopoly.
Let’s look at the cultural winners and losers of 2019:
Loser: Jussie Smollett, the “Empire” actor and Hollywood race hoaxer who cost the taxpayers of Chicago more than $130,000 for all the time it took police to look for a nonexistent hate crime. Nothing says viral like a black gay celebrity claiming he was beaten by red-hatted Trumpster thugs. For two weeks, the left went nuts. Celebrities, politicians and the “news” media convicted Trump World for what it had allegedly caused. And it never happened. And now all of America knows it.
Winner: “Unplanned,” the movie about Abby Johnson, who converted from Planned Parenthood clinic director to conservative Catholic activist. Major music labels refused to license songs for it. Cable-news channels refused to run ads for it. Newspaper film critics refused to review it. And yet the little film became the talk of social media. What Pure Flix delivered has done more to advance the pro-life cause than the National Right to Life Committee has accomplished in the past three decades.
Loser: the abortion industry. In September, the Planned Parenthood-affiliated Guttmacher Institute estimated that there were about 862,000 abortions in 2017, nearly 200,000 fewer than in 2011. The abortion rate — the number of abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 — dropped to 13.5 in 2017, the lowest rate since Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973.
Loser: The Walt Disney Studios. It dominated the top-grossing movies, but superhero flicks like “Avengers: Endgame” and “Captain Marvel” pandered aerobically to feminists. And for all that energy, leftist sites like Slate still bashed the movies for being “too patronizing, too late.” Why bother messing with superheroes?
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
From Townhall – Liberal Elites Are Even Ruining Hamburgers
Saw a link to this article in my E-Mail this morning and had to share it with everyone. It may sound silly at first but read it and you will see the many truths in it. So without further ado here it is.
Liberal Elites Are Even Ruining Hamburgers And They Must Be Stopped
Liberals can’t be happy with simply ruining the lives of decent conservatives for cheap political gain. They have to ruin hamburgers, too.
The burger is the ultimate Normal food, and horrible liberal elitists are trying to screw it up with lame alternative burgers because they are terrible.
Let me be clear, to quote an awful ex-president: Nothing I write here is open to debate. I’m turning the epistemic closure thing back on the libs. It is impossible to disagree with my ground beef rantings, and if you do, you are racist, sexist, and a burgerphobic cisdinner hate criminal of hatred.
Let’s clarify something else. Hamburgers are the King of American Casual Food. You can eat it in a bar, you can eat it in a car. Just don’t eat it in some trendy coastal eatery because they’ll screw it all up and you’ll end up dreaming of a Big Mac.
Sloppy Joes are gross. They are burgers’ ne’er-do-well little brother, 35 and living in the basement nursing emotional damage because mom liked burgers better. And who wouldn’t? Sloppy Joes are orangey muck plopped onto a bun. They provide none of the firm but juicy consistency, or the satisfying interplay of extras and condiments, that make the burger nature’s perfect food. They are mere goo and are unworthy of a proud and free people.
Naturally, artisanal Sloppy Joes are probably about to become a thing.
Even the name is unappetizing, unless you are Obama. My kid says hot dogs are really tacos because of the bread V, and he makes a good point. Except tacos are tasty and hot dogs are awful.
Eat a burger, like a man, damnit. And don’t be a Fredocon and whine about how the bun has gluten.
Millennial elitist dorks are all about screwing up burgers. “Gourmet” burgers, they call them. But they are a sad simulacrum of true burgers, and a crime against nature. The menus of those precious gastropubs that spring up in the gentrified blue coastal urban centers are loaded with “specialty burgers” with cutesy names and inane combinations of ingredients. It’s sad. Unable to create anything of value, these goateed hipster monsters can only pervert and deform that which is pure and beautiful. A burger is simple goodness. And, as they do with everything else, liberals screw them up.
A burger requires, at the threshold, good meat. There lies the first problem. This meat must come from a cow. But many of these dorks will try to create a sort of patty from something else, like (shiver) vegan pea protein. Note that peas are terrible, and only by putting them on a burger in place of a beef patty can these offensive soft green nuts be made worse.
But the elite can even screw up meat. Somewhere along the line, maybe when the waygu craze started, they decided that soft, tasteless beef with the consistency of wet newspaper was the bomb. You get an $18 burger (I live in LA – air costs $1 a breath) with this fancy meat, and it’s like mush. Why is it so hard to make “good meat” actually good?
But it’s artisanal, which means overpriced and bad. “Oh, the cow was grass fed and massaged and hugged and it’s favorite band was Styx,” they’ll say, like I want to be friends with the damn Dinner Horse. I want to eat it, and I want it to taste like beef. But fancy elitist liberal beef doesn’t taste like beef. It tastes like ruined dreams and the Deep Thoughts of Kamala Harris.
Beef. Normal beef. You can fry it on the grill or cook it over a flame – see, I totally embrace diversity – but it can’t be some weird mushpatty. Not if you want a burger instead of some pathetic charade on a bun.
The bun. I’m open minded. You can do the traditional sesame seed style, or a potato roll. If you want to get kinky, throw it on rye for a patty melt. I will even accept a ciabatta in some cases. But a pretzel bun? What the hell is that?
Stop doing horrible things just to try to freak out the squares.
Cheese. Some of you eat burgers without cheese for reasons I cannot fathom. This is wrong and you are wrong. But worse than putting no cheese on your burger is putting the wrong cheese on your burger, thereby making it a wrong burger.
American cheese is the quintessential burger cheese, and the name probably explains why liberals hate it. Cheddar is acceptable. Bleu cheese? That’s borderline – sure, I’ve tried it, but who hasn’t gone through an experimental phase?
Swiss? Gross. Provolone? What’s wrong with you? Gruyere? Now you’re just screwing with us.
Things to put on burgers break down into condiments and other stuff. Optional condiments include mustard and mayonnaise. Not Miracle Whip. I am not even sure what that is. Also, no Sriracha, no guacamole, no BBQ sauce. Mandatory condiments are ketchup and more ketchup. One of a hamburger’s key roles is to serve as a ketchup delivery system. There’s this one trendy place in LA that will remain nameless and patronless that serves this weird tomato fruit roll-up it calls a “ketchup leather.” They got the leather part right. The burger, which hipster doofuses rave about, tastes like an old shoe.
Special sauce aka thousand island dressing aka ketchup + mayonnaise is an acceptable alternative to ketchup. Note that “ketchup” does not include “catsup” or grody Whole Foods/Trader Joe’s “organic” ketchup. The only good ketchup is mass-produced stuff you buy in a regular supermarket where they don’t sell kale.
Other stuff. Bacon? Not my scene but I won’t judge. Lettuce? Eh? Take it or leave it. Tomatoes? Yes. Pickles? Yes. Onions? Yes, grilled, fresh, or – if you are awesome – both. But nothing weird. No “tomato jam” or “onion chow-chow.”
It’s not hard. Don’t be weird for the sake of being weird and you’ll have a decent burger. Start messing with something that works and you get Obamacare.
Look. They’ve taken Hollywood. They’ve taken the media. They’ve taken the college campuses. And they’ve messed them all up. We can’t give up burgers, too.
My upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy contains no burger recipes, because normal people don’t need burger recipes. Normals take meat, throw it on a grill, put it on a bun, put some stuff on it, and eat it like the heroes they are.
And liberals? They screw up everything they touch. The arts. Academia. Dinner.
So, confirm your normality by rejecting burger mutations. And confirm Kavanaugh, too.
Miss America: The Latest Institution Destroyed by the Left
As I have documented repeatedly, the left ruins just about everything it touches: the universities, the arts, the elementary schools and high schools, religion, sports and ordinary, everyday interactions between human beings — especially human beings of different races. The latest examples — in just the last few weeks — are the Boy Scouts, sculpture and the Miss America pageant.
The left’s decades long attempt to radically change the Boy Scouts has ended in triumph. Now that the Boy Scouts is admitting not only older girls but also younger girls — as Cub Scouts — it is dropping “Boy” from its name and becoming Scouts BSA. Thanks to the left, the Boy Scouts, one of the most socially and morally constructive organizations in America, is no longer the Boy Scouts.
As a result of that, as a result of the decision to admit openly gay males as troop leaders (the Boy Scouts never asked potential troop leaders about their sexual orientation but did not allow openly gay troop leaders) and as a result of factors specific to the Mormon church, the largest sponsor of Boy Scout troops in America, the church has ended its 100-year relationship with the Boy Scouts.
Another victim of the left in recent weeks is the arts. Last week, The New York Times published a serious “review” on a major new “art work” at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The “art work” is a set of four giant piles of sculpted excrement. As described by Times writer Nina Siegal: “I walked into the excrement.
The artistic left is infatuated with feces, urine and menstrual blood. Last year, New York City’s famed Guggenheim Museum featured an all-gold toilet bowl into which visitors were invited to relieve themselves. As the exhibit was titled “America,” one could then literally urinate and defecate on America. Why not? The left does that to America and Western civilization every day.
The latest victim of the left is the Miss America contest. The Miss America board announced that contestants will no longer wear swimsuits or evening gowns because Miss America will no longer be about physical beauty. It will be about “the hopes and aspirations” of 52 women contestants.
My first reaction is: Why stop there? To be consistent with its new ideals, the event should no longer be televised but rather broadcast on the radio. Only then will the contestants’ looks be truly irrelevant.
The left, which has brought “sex week” to almost every college campus, which has introduced coed dormitories with coed showers and bathrooms, and which has told young women that sex without any commitment should be as much fun for them as it is for men, is now the guardian of modesty at the Miss America contest.
In particular, feminists hate it when women try to look sexy, especially in the eyes of men.
One of the left’s favorite terms to describe the Miss America swimsuit competition (and even the evening gown competition) is “dehumanizing.” In a long article on the Miss America decision, The New York Times quoted Julie Zeilinger, who founded “a feminist blog called FBomb”: “in 2018 this organization has realized it’s dehumanizing to compare and judge women’s bodies in front of a vast, international audience.”
This feminist charge is ubiquitous but never explained. Why is it dehumanizing?
One irony is feminists have argued for decades that women should be allowed to walk around topless, just as men can.
Another irony is that when non-Muslims argue that Muslim women wearing a chador is dehumanizing, the left charges them with intolerance and Islamophobia.
A third irony is women are as interested in seeing beautiful women in swimsuits as men are.
I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, and I recall my mother and father enjoying the Miss America pageant every year. They would discuss their favorites with each other, both of them perfectly at peace with the proceedings, as was the Christian majority.
Which raises a final irony: When America was far more conservative, far more religious and far more concerned with daily modesty in dress, and when it insisted that male students and female students reside in separate dorms at college, it celebrated the Miss America pageant with its swimsuit competition. That was a healthier America.
Inside of a few weeks, the left has gravely damaged the Boy Scouts, probably destroyed the Miss America pageant and pounded another nail into the coffin of art.
That’s what the left does best – ruins whatever it touches. That’s pretty much all it does.
The Other Me 