AUGUST 1st, 2024 | Grant Johnson

The Right Is Ascending

Good things are happening and small victories are piling up.

Doesn’t it feel like we’re winning?

For so much of my adult life, conservative principles have been undermined and criticized. Power flowed to the left and the most we could ever hope for was for progressive insanity to slow. I used to listen to podcasts about the inevitability of left-wing ascendancy. The ratchet-effect was a term to describe how things always turn left, but never right. The culture seemed to spiral downwards year-by-year and a left-wing, progressive woke insanity was always on the cusp of orgasmic total takeover.

And yet, here we are.

The recent assassination attempt (and failure) on Donald Trump seems to be symbolic of a new era that is finally… FINALLY emerging. The attempt by progressives to strike a fatal blow against all that is good, has failed. The reactionary generation is BUILDING. The culture is changing. Politics is evolving. The era of Woke is dying and Hollywood is the leading indicator.

I recently wrote that the October 7th, 2023 attacks on Israel were a wake up call for Jews. Especially cosmopolitan Jews who were comfortable with progressivism and wokeness. The wake-up call has landed hard, and Hollywood is a harbinger of the kind of cultural change that is on the way.

At the time of this writing the movie Twisters is number one at the summer box office and one of the controversial media pieces about it was that it was a movie about tornados, and it ignored a good opportunity to champion the effects of climate change. The director didn’t care and said so explicitly.

This comes at a time when the latest Woke-Star Wars series is mocked relentlessly and the most anticipated movie of the summer is an irreverent, politically incorrect, gross-out action comedy, in the form of Deadpool & Wolverine.

But here’s another point: who cares if these movies and series are left-wing or right-wing? Due to technology and a shattered shared culture, there is more avenues for entertainment than ever before.

The real conservative lament is the loss of tradition. In this case, the tradition of a shared culture that upheld common values and embodied the conservatism that frequently found itself under attack from the left. With the dawn of the internet and the world getting bigger and more accessible in so many different technological ways, this has led to a new normal of abundance and variety that conservatives should, at this point, simply embrace.

No longer do conservatives need to lament the mainstream media. X and a variety of social media platforms have now completely abolished the liberal narrative. Substack and e-mail newsletters and podcasts and websites like PostCanadian offer a wider variety of information and news today than the era of “three channels on cable” will ever be able to compete with. My Dad uses the internet to read the newspaper, but my children don’t really understand what a newspaper even is. The times that people like us (vanguard conservatives) saw coming ten or twenty years ago have finally arrived for everyone… and it’s way, way better.

This goes for almost everything.

Let’s get back to the movie example.

Conservatives are often the ones lamenting movies not being what they used to be. You know what though? Movie options have never, ever been better. The era of everyone watching the same few movies and television shows is over… and that’s a good thing.

People of my generation (Gen X) harken back to the glorious 80s when “classic” movies like Ghostbusters and Back To The Future engrained themselves into the culture and our collective shared experience. They were gold-standard classics back then, but nobody remembers the cascade of shitty movies that were around at the same time.

They also forget that the options for watching movies were severely limited. The way to watch a movie in 1985 was to go to the movie theatre that served as a pipeline for about seven or eight Hollywood movie studios. If you had a VCR, you might be able to rent an older movie from one of those seven or eight Hollywood studios (if it was in stock) or settle for one of those B-movies churned out by the thirty or so fly-by-night film companies. Maybe a film festival would arrive in your town and you’d hope to attend to see something made somewhere other than Hollywood, but that was about it.

Today, you not only have access to every movie that has ever been made (with a few exceptions) with the simple push of a button, but you can track down all sorts of movies from all over the world that would have been impossible a generation ago. Streaming services and online distribution allow for a wide range of whatever you are interested in.

Today’s biggest problem is sifting through all the choice and finding diamonds in the rough.

This goes for music, books, games, art… the world is bigger and offers more variety than ever.

Why is this good for conservatives?

Because in 2024, you can be as conservative as you want to be. Doing so has destroyed the gatekeepers and the tastemakers, and the marketplace of ideas is more dynamic and Darwinian than ever.

Conservatives need to start looking ahead to what winning is going to look like in the future. We’re already seeing this overtly with politics itself.

Mainstream conservative politics is moving further right and faster than I ever imagined. Listen to Danielle Smith talk with Jordan Peterson in his recent podcast. There are several things shocking about this exchange.

Firstly, a sitting Premier of Alberta is talking to Jordan Peterson for over an hour. This isn’t something that was considered palatable by mainstream standards even a few years ago. Today, it didn’t even make waves.

Secondly, Peterson brought stuff up during the interview regarding the positives of climate change. This is a position that would have been cancellable only a few years ago. Danielle chose her words carefully, but she didn’t disagree with much of what he said.

I’m old enough to remember when Danielle just mentioned that the “science isn’t settled” during a CBC debate back in 2012 and the crowd booed her and it was played as completely taboo and heretical by the mainstream media.

Thirdly, Danielle, for the first time in recent memory, came off as someone to the left of who she is presented as usually. Her libertarian leanings, her sympathy for transexuals and her approval of gay couples adopting children are well outside the direction of conservative momentum. Danielle could live long enough to see herself become cuckservative by the polarizing standards of the future.

And about that future. it’s probably going to be hard-right in way that we won’t today fully admit…

I have suddenly found myself working with mostly young people ranging in age from the early 20’s to early 30’s. I am often surprized by how based they are. Some of them are very online based and repeating talking points ranging from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate. It’s like I’m talking to Tucker Carlson when anything other than work pops up.

Others are realistic and practical in a very non-Woke manner. The hegemony of Wokeness is taken for granted, but not at all respected or observed. To be sure, there are remnants of Wokeness still percolating in the culture, but they are not embraced like Wokeness aspires to be embraced…Wokeness is, in fact, mocked.

In other words, the kids are alright.

The evolution of conservatism is unfolding before our eyes and it is ascendant. I no longer subscribe to black-pilled notions of an inevitable century of wokeness leading us to utter despair. I think we are looking at a course correction long before total collapse. The Doomers in our movement need to check themselves, because the builders are building and moving forward and leaving these losers in the dust.

I would suggest conservatives everywhere rejoice in the recent wins.

Go out and enjoy August. It’s the best month of summer. Have a cocktail. See a movie. Great things are happening, and the future is looking bright. Support the things you love. Ignore the things you hate. Instead of conserving start building! Push forward. Enjoy.

We’re winning.