Monday, October 02, 2017

So Much Winning!

About a year ago, my favorite podcast was GLoP - Goldberg, Long and Podhoretz. Those three worthies, who normally wrote about politics, discussed movies and TV on the podcast, for the most part, with some politics as well. I was a big fan of all of them and Jonah Goldberg in particular. I think he's witty and tremendously well-read. I don't listen to it any more. All three of them have completely missed the boat.

When Trump took on the NFL, Jonah and John Podhoretz made the standard, erudite conservative noises on Twitter. What a shame the president is lowering himself to slam the NFL! How terribly gauche! I don't read his work any more, other than to skim his weekly G-file column to see if he's managed to get a clue, but I'm sure Jonah knocked out a long piece chiding Trump for being such a child. I'll bet he worked in references to the Whigs and the Code of Hammurabi and words like sesquipedalian and elucidate. Everything he would say would be correct, well-considered, self-consistent with his previous works and completely worthless.

Like almost every other large organization out there lately, the NFL sided with the social justice warriors against us normals. That's not news, the entertainment industry and academia do it all the time. Only this time, a big organization got punched in the face for their troubles. For the first time I can remember, a massive entity paid a substantial price for flipping us the bird. Other groups might have second thoughts the next time they want to indulge in some noxious virtue signalling. That wasn't going to happen without Trump being his normal, combative self.

When the Supreme Court jammed gay marriage down our throats and ANTIFA clones began to shut down free speech, the culture war went from cold to hot. Those were followed up by lectures from celebrities, news channels doing a propaganda blitzkrieg and formerly respected entities like the New York Times questioning the need for freedom of speech and doing their best to rehabilitate communism.

In the middle of a hot war, you need combative allies, not thumb-suckers who are going to write essays about Woodrow Wilson. The folks at the National Review and Commentary have been doing that for decades and it resulted in a total surrender of the culture to the progressives.

Is it ugly, what Trump is doing? Yes. Is it gauche and over-the-top? You bet. Does he dismember the truth at times? Yep. So what? He's winning some battles in the culture war. That's not something we've been able to say in a long, long time.

This misses the point as well. Why is the NFL even involved in this? It sells football games, not social justice. That's a 46% loss of good will in exchange for nothing. Not winning! Losing bigly!

5 comments:

Mostly Nothing said...

Budweiser is considering dropping their over $1 billion sponsership of the NFL. They have a menu item for leaving your thoughts on their customer service line.

ligneus said...

Sad isn't it? I used to subscribe to Commentary, I canceled it over a year ago.
Some good explanation of the problem[s] in this article by George Neumayr in The American Spectator.
https://spectator.org/the-establishment-gops-meaningless-majority/?utm_source=American+Spectator+Emails&utm_campaign=35d8d60054-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-35d8d60054-104258473

ligneus said...

I'll try a hyperlink.

The Establishment GOP's Meaningless Majority

K T Cat said...

Great link, ligneus. Sadly, the most recent G-file was exactly that - a grave warning of the threat posed by Roy Moore's victory in Alabama. Roy Moore may be the wrong candidate for the Acela Corridor and Silicon Valley crowds, but he represents Alabama, not New York and for them, he might be just right. That's why we have states, so the people of Dixie don't have to be represented by the snobs at the National Review or CNN.

Ohioan@Heart said...

And why we have an Electoral College.