Welcome back to another deep dive. Today we are
wading into waters that I think for most of us
feel a little bit like drowning. We are talking
about a phrase that just dominates the headlines.
It fills up our social media feeds. And let's
be honest, it probably raises your blood pressure
just hearing it. It definitely triggers a visceral
reaction. It's that, you know, tightness in the
chest you get when you open Twitter or X or whatever
and you just see everyone screaming. We are talking
about the culture war. And the mission for this
deep dive is it's a bit different than usual.
Usually when people talk about this, they want
to argue in the war. They want to debate the
latest outrage, the banned book, the protest,
the tweet of the day. We aren't doing that. No.
We are not here to fight the war. We are here
to look at the map. Yes. We want to take the
back off the wash and see the gears turning.
We want to understand the machinery. Because
when I was going through the stack of research
for this, and we have a massive stack today,
listeners, ranging from 19th century German history
to modern algorithmic studies, global political
science, I realized something. I realized I didn't
actually know what this thing was. Is it organic?
Do we all just... naturally hate each other now?
Or is this a machine? Is it a strategy? And that
is the central question. It really is. And the
answer, as we go through the sources, it points
heavily toward machine. Right. It's a manufactured
phenomenon with a history, a structure, and a
surprisingly large global footprint. And spoiler
alert. It did not start on Facebook. No, far
from it. So let's start at the very beginning.
Before we even get into the history, we need
a working definition. Good idea. Because culture
war is one of those terms that gets thrown around
so loosely, it almost loses its meaning. When
the sources define it, what are we actually looking
at? So stripped of all the buzzwords, the core
definition we're working with is that a culture
war is a conflict, often metaphorical, but sometimes
very real between social groups. Okay. But here's
the key part. It's not just a disagreement. It
is a struggle to politically impose a specific
ideology or a set of values on mainstream society.
That word impose feels like the heavy lifter
there. It's not just I like chocolate. You like
vanilla. Exactly. I like chocolate. You like
vanilla is pluralism. That's a healthy society.
You do your thing. I do my thing. Right. A culture
war is your preference for vanilla is an existential
threat to the nation. And I need to pass laws
to make sure vanilla is marginalized. It's a
struggle for dominance. It's a struggle for reality.
It is. It's about defining reality. It's taking
a private preference or a moral belief and recognizing
it into a public policy requirement. Right. Turning
your taste into my law. Precisely. And in doing
so, it creates what sociologists call a cleavage
in society. Which sounds painful. It is painful.
It's a split. And the goal of the people waging
these wars on either side is often to make sure
that split is as wide and, you know, as unbridgeable
as possible. They want a canyon. They want you
to feel that you cannot possibly coexist with
a person on the other side of that canyon. OK,
so if that's the mechanism imposing values to
create a split, where does it come from? If I
ask the average person on the street, when did
the culture war start? They'd probably say the
1960s. Right. Woodstock, hippies. Vietnam, the
counterculture, all of that. That's the standard
answer. Right. Or maybe they'd point to the 1990s
with Newt Gingrich and the Contract of America.
But the research took us back a lot further to
a place in time I really, really did not expect.
We are talking about 1870s Germany. Yes. We have
to talk about the Kulturkampf. Which is, that's
just the German word for culture war, right?
It is. The English phrase we use today is what
linguists call a Kalk. It's a loan translation.
We literally just translated Kulturkampf. Kultur
meaning culture, Kampf meaning struggle or war.
But they weren't fighting about gender pronouns
or gastos in 1871 Berlin. No. What was the original
culture war about? It was a heavyweight title
fight between two massive powers. In one corner,
you had the newly unified German Empire, led
by the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Okay.
In the other corner, you had the Catholic Church,
led by Pope Pius IX. Bismarck versus the Pope.
That is... High stakes. That's like Godzilla
versus Kong for the 19th century. Extremely high
stakes. And you have to understand the context.
Germany had just become a nation state in 1871.
Right. Brand new. Bismarck is obsessed with unity.
He wants a strong, modern, secular state where
everyone speaks German and salutes the Kaiser.
And he looks at the Catholic Church, which makes
up about a third of the population, and he sees
a problem. What's the problem? They're just going
to church, aren't they? Bismarck didn't see it
that way. He saw a group of people whose ultimate
loyalty wasn't to the Kaiser or the German Constitution.
But to Rome. But to a foreign power. The Vatican.
He called them Reichsfeinde. Which means? Enemies
of the empire. He believed that if push came
to shove, a good Catholic would listen to the
Pope, not the Chancellor. So it was a question
of sovereignty. Who's really in charge here?
Precisely. So he launched the Kulturkampf. And
this wasn't just, you know, rhetoric or mean
tweets. He passed what were called the May laws.
The May laws. The state took control of educating
the clergy. They established a special court
for ecclesiastical affairs. They made civil marriage
mandatory, taking that power away from the church.
Wow. At the height of this, almost all the Catholic
bishops in Prussia were either imprisoned. So
when we talk about culture war today being nasty,
it's not imprisoning bishops nasty. Not yet.
Not quite. But the dynamic is identical. It was
a secular modernizing state trying to break the
power of traditional religious authority. And
there's another layer to this that often gets
missed, which I found really interesting in the
notes. The ethnic element. The Polish connection.
Right. A lot of the Catholics in the Prussian
territories were ethnic Poles. So for Bismarck,
attacking the church was also a way to suppress
Polish nationalism and force Germanization. Which
sounds eerily familiar to modern debates. It's
never just about the stated issue, is it? Never.
It's about identity, ethnicity, and who belongs
in the nation. That is the DNA of the culture
war. It's always about who gets to define the
soul of the nation. Is Germany a secular Protestant
empire? Or is there room for Polish Catholics?
Bismarck said no. So the term exists in the 1870s.
How does it get to America? Does it just hop
on a boat? It hybridated for a long time. The
term would pop up in obscure academic papers
or newspapers in the 1920s and 40s, usually referring
back to Germany. But it wasn't something regular
people said. An intellectual curiosity. Exactly.
But the feeling. The dynamic that arrived in
the U .S. way before the word did. The sources
point to the 1920s as the first real American
culture war. And the parallels between the 1920s
and the 2020s are actually staggering. Really?
Oh, yeah. If you look at the societal pressures,
it's almost a mirror image. OK, set the scene
for us. All right. So you have the roaring 20s.
World War I is over. You have this massive explosion
of technology and urbanization, radios, cars,
movies. And for the first time in American history.
More Americans live in cities than in the countryside.
And the cities are where the sin is. In the eyes
of the rural traditionalists, yes. The cities
had jazz. They had flappers with short hair and
short skirts. They had speakeasies. All the fun
stuff. And crucially, they had immigrants. Millions
of Catholics and Jews arriving from southern
and eastern Europe. So the rural Protestant majority
feels besieged. They feel like they're losing
their country. They feel like their values are
being eroded by these aliens in the cities who
drink alcohol and listen to syncopated music.
So you get a massive backlash. And this is the
era of prohibition. This is the era of prohibition,
which we often think of as a health thing. But
it was a direct culture war attack on the drinking
habits of urban immigrants. The German beer halls,
the Irish pubs. Exactly. And you also see the
resurgence of the KKK in the 20s, but not just
as anti -black. In this era, they were explicitly
anti -Catholic and anti -immigrant. Right. They
were trying to enforce a 100 percent Americanism.
Right. That was Protestant and rural. And this
all culminated in an election that sounds like
a total nightmare. 1928. Al Smith. Oh, poor Al
Smith. He was the perfect villain for the culture
warriors of the time. He was the Democratic nominee.
And he was the governor of New York, the ultimate
city slicker. He was a wet. He wanted to end
prohibition. And most damning of all, he was
Catholic. The first Catholic major party nominee.
And the attacks on him were just vicious. We
think fake news is new. People circulated pamphlets
claiming that the Pope was going to build a tunnel
from Rome to the White House to give Smith his
daily orders. A tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean.
A literal tunnel. It's funny. We look back at
that now and laugh about the tunnel, but people
really believed it. They did. It speaks to the
level of fear. It taps into that primal fear
of foreign influence. And Smith got absolutely
crushed. Right. The country wasn't ready. The
traditional forces won that battle. But the war,
the divide between urban modernists and rural
traditionalists, it never went away. It just
simmered. OK, let's fast forward a bit. We move
through the mid -century and we have to talk
about a group that keeps popping up in our research
like a bad penny. Yes. The John Birch Society.
The John Birch Society is like the Kevin Bacon
of right wing conspiracy theories. Everything
connects back to them. Who are they? Founded
in 1958 by Robert Welch. They were ostensibly
an anti -communist group, but they were extreme.
I mean, truly extreme. How so? They believed
that President Eisenhower, a five -star general,
the hero of D -Day, was a secret communist agent.
Eisenhower, the guy who built the highway system?
A commie. In their world, yes. They believed
there was a massive internal conspiracy to destroy
American sovereignty and values. They thought
the civil rights movement was a communist plot.
And water fluoridation. And water fluoridation,
yes. And while they were marginalized by mainstream
Republicans for a while, their ideas, they didn't
die. The sources trace a direct line from them
to the modern Christian right. It's a straight
line. You can trace the personnel and the tactics
from the John Birch Society to people like Phyllis
Schlafly. She was the anti -feminist icon, right?
The one who stopped the Equal Rights Amendment.
Correct. And she started her career promoting
John Birch Society literature. Then you have
Tim LaHaye, who wrote the massive bestselling
Left Behind series about the rapture. He was
deeply influenced by this Bircher style of paranoia,
the idea that the world is divided into us, the
faithful, and them, the conspirators, globalists.
So they built the infrastructure, they built
the mailing lists, they built the sense of persecution.
Yes. But we still don't have the name yet. When
does culture war become a household term in the
United States? 1991. The pivot point. Enter James
Davison Hunter. James Davison Hunter is a sociologist
at the University of Virginia. And he publishes
a book called Culture Wars, The Struggle to Define
America. And this book hits the intellectual
scene like a bomb because he finally gave a name
to what everyone was feeling. What was his big
insight? Because he wasn't just saying people
disagree. He was saying something fundamental
had changed in the American landscape. Right.
His thesis was that the old lines of division
in America were dissolving. For most of history,
the divide was denominational Protestant versus
Catholic versus Jew. Or it was economic labor
versus capital. Hunter said, no, the new divide
is ideological. He called it progressivism versus
orthodoxy. OK, break those down. What does he
mean by orthodoxy in this context? Orthodoxy,
in Hunter's definition, is the belief that moral
truth is external, transcendent. and unchangeable
fixed it is fixed it comes from god or scripture
or natural law you don't get to vote on it It
was true in 1890, and it is true in 1990. And
progressivism. Progressivism is the belief that
moral truth is an ongoing process. It evolves.
We discover it through reason, science, and social
change. It's adaptable. It's adaptable. As society
learns more, our morals should shift. And his
key observation, which I found really fascinating,
was about who ends up sharing a foxhole in this
new war. Yes, this is the aha moment of the whole
book. Right. He pointed out that an Orthodox
Jew An Orthodox Catholic and an Evangelical Protestant
suddenly found that they had more in common with
each other than they did with the progressive
members of their own faiths. That's the realignment.
The Orthodox Jew and the Evangelical agree on
the nature of truth, even if their theology differs
on the details. Exactly. They both agree that
there is a book, and the book says X. Meanwhile,
the Reformed Jew and the liberal Protestant agree
that the book is a metaphor, and we need to...
Update our views. And because they disagree on
the nature of reality, they clash on everything
else. Everything. Abortion, gun politics, separation
of church and state, privacy, drug use, homosexuality,
censorship. Hunter argued these aren't separate
arguments. They are battles in a single war over
who gets to define reality. Is reality fixed
by God or defined by us? Now, there's another
theory in the stack about why this exploded in
the early 90s specifically. And it's a psychological
one involving the Cold War. This is from historian
Kristen Kobes -Demez. This is one of my favorite
insights in the research because it explains
the timing. It's the vacuum theory. Tell us about
the vacuum. So for 40 years. From the late 40s
to 1989, American conservatives, and specifically
evangelicals, had a clear, terrifying enemy,
the Soviet Union. Godless communism. Right. It
was an existential threat. It could end the world.
It was easy to rally the troops. We have to be
strong to fight the Reds. Very easy. And Dumez
argues that they constructed a specific identity
around that. They championed strict masculine
gender roles and the traditional nuclear family,
not just because the Bible said so, but because
they viewed it as a defense strategy. A strong
father protects the nation from communism. Softness
equals death. The family unit was the bunker.
But then... 1991 comes along. The Berlin Wall
is down. The Soviet Union collapses. We won.
We won. But for a movement built on fighting
an existential threat, victory is a catastrophe.
Right. If the dragon is dead, what does the dragon
slayer do? The external threat vanished. The
defining antagonist that held the coalition together
was gone. So they needed a new dragon. Exactly.
Dumez argues that the leadership transferred
that threat perception. They took all that fear,
all that organizational energy and that militant
mindset, and they turned it inward. The call
is coming from inside the house. Literally. The
new threat wasn't nuclear missiles. It was feminism.
It was gay rights. It was secular humanism. They
framed these domestic changes as just as dangerous
to the nation's survival as the Soviets had been.
Wow. They argued that moral rot would destroy
America just as surely as a nuclear bomb. And
that sets the stage perfectly for the declaration
of war. 1992. The 1992 Republican National Convention
in Houston. I looked up the video of this speech.
Pat Buchanan. It is intense. It's legendary.
It doesn't look like a modern political speech.
It looks like a sermon from a pulpit. Remember.
Buchanan had run against the sitting president,
George H .W. Bush, in the primary. He represented
the insurgent, paleo -conservative wing. Right.
He lost. But he got a primetime speaking slot
to unite the party. He did not give a let's all
get along speech. No, he threw a grenade. He
said, and I'm quoting here, there is a religious
war going on in our country for the soul of America.
It is a cultural war as critical to the kind
of nation we will one day be, as was the Cold
War itself. There it is. He explicitly links
it to the Cold War. He's telling the base the
war isn't over. The battlefield just changed.
And he listed the targets. Environmentalists,
feminists, abortion, homosexual rights. He basically
said, if you aren't with us, you are against
America. It was a watershed moment. Strategically,
it's debated. Many political scientists think
it actually hurt George H .W. Bush in the short
term. How so? It made the party look angry and
exclusionary, and moderate suburban women drifted
toward Bill Clinton. But in the long term? In
the long term, it worked. It energized the base.
It proved that culture war rhetoric motivates
the core voters. It gets people to the polls.
Two years later, in 1994, the Republicans took
control of Congress for the first time in 40
years. The Republican Revolution. Driven largely
by this cultural angst. And one of the specific
battles in that 94 era was the history wars,
which, again, reading the notes, I felt like
I was reading a newspaper from today. The debate
over the national history standards. Right. You
had Dick Cheney's wife attacking these proposed
education standards. She said they were too depressing.
Right. Too much about slavery, the KKK, the Great
Depression. She wanted celebratory history. And
the other side wanted critical history. It's
the exact same script. It is. The question was.
Should history class be about building patriotism
and myths? Or should it be an honest accounting
of failures? It is the exact same debate we are
having today about critical race theory or the
1619 Project. The script hasn't changed in 30
years. Only the acronyms have. It really does
feel like we are stuck in a lute. We are. Because
the underlying value clash imposing one view
of the nation over the other hasn't been resolved.
OK, so that's the history. We know where it came
from. But now I want to get to the part of the
outline that challenges the whole premise. Segment
four. Is this war even real? This is where we
have to put on our skepticism hats. Because there
is a school of thought that says we normal people
actually get along fine. Right. This is the Wolf
thesis. Political scientist Alan Wolf. wrote
a book in the late 90s called One Nation After
All. Okay. He went out and did qualitative interviews
with middle class Americans in the suburbs, and
he found that they weren't screaming at each
other. They were pragmatic. They were moderate.
They were tolerant. Yes. He argued that the culture
war was a myth invented by elites. It was politicians
and cable news hosts screaming for ratings while
real people just wanted to mow their lawns, raise
their kids, and get along with their neighbors.
That sounds nice. Is it still true? That's the
scary part. The data suggests Wolf was right
then, but he's wrong now. What changed? The conflict
trickled down. We have sorted. A meta -analysis
of data from 1992 to 2012 showed that culture
war attitudes have become foundational elements
of people's belief systems. Meaning what? It
used to be that you picked a political party
because of your union or your taxes or your family
tradition. And maybe you disagreed with the party
on abortion or guns, but you stayed. Sure. Now
it's the opposite. If you have a strong view
on guns or abortion, you pick your party based
on that. You even pick your church based on your
politics. So we are stacking our identities.
All the flags are the same color. Yes. And that
means we don't just disagree with the other side.
We don't know them. We don't live near them.
We don't worship with them. We have physically
and socially sorted ourselves into two different
countries. But there's still this element of
fabrication, the idea that someone wants us to
be fighting. E .J. Dionne has this great quote.
He said, the division is between those who want
to have a culture war and those who don't. Who
wants a culture war? Who benefits from us being
angry? People who need to mobilize a base but
don't have popular economic policies or organizations
that need to raise money. Sociologist Scott Meltzer
did a fascinating deep dive on the NRA, the National
Rifle Association. I thought the NRA was just
about gun safety originally. It was. For a long
time, it was a sportsman's club. Hunting, marksmanship,
safety, conservation. But Meltzer argues they
intentionally pivoted to a culture war footing
in the late 70s. How? They started framing gun
ownership not as a hobby, but as a proxy for
freedom, for masculinity, and for real America.
They're coming for your guns. Exactly. They created
a narrative of victimization. Elites in Washington
want to take your heritage away. This creates
a much tighter bond than I like shooting targets.
Right. It creates an in -group and an out -group.
And once you have an out -group, you can mobilize
people and raise money. Fear pays better than
hobbies. Much better. The notes also mention
focus on the family doing something similar with
the media. Yes. Susan B. Ridgely writes about
how Focus on the Family realized that if their
followers watched mainstream news, CBS, NBC,
they might hear perspectives that soften their
views or normalized liberal ideas. So they built
an alternative news ecosystem. Radio shows, magazines,
yes. They told their followers, the mainstream
media is lying to you. We are the only source
of truth. They depicted the traditional family
as being under constant siege. That is the precursor
to the social media bubbles we live in today.
It's the direct ancestor. They bifurcated reality.
You create a closed loop where your followers
only hear what you want them to hear. Now, this
leads to a theory that might upset some people,
but it's in the data, the asymmetry thesis. This
is from political scientists Grossman and Hopkins.
it's essential for understanding why the two
parties talk past each other what's the theory
they argue that the two parties are not mirror
images they are structurally different beasts
the republican party they argue functions as
an ideological movement meaning meaning it is
organized around a core set of conservative principles
small government Tradition, liberty. It's easier
to unify an ideological movement around abstract
culture war ideas like freedom or the flag. The
messaging is top down and cohesive. And the Democrats.
The Democratic Party functions as a coalition
of social groups. You have labor unions. You
have environmentalists. You have black voters.
You have LGBTQ activists. You have urban professionals.
It's a big tent. A very big, messy tent. And
these groups often don't agree with each other.
A union pipe fitter might not agree with an environmental
activist. A conservative black churchgoer might
not agree with an LGBTQ activist. It's harder
to get everyone on the same page. It is much
harder for Democrats to wage a coherent culture
war because they are trying to herd cats. Republicans
are marching in formation. So Republicans are
structurally better equipped to fight these battles.
Correct. Which is why they often initiate them.
They have the machinery to keep the message disciplined.
Let's move into the modern era, the digital age.
Segment five, how did the Internet change the
machinery? Well, if the 90s was the declaration
of war, the Internet was the distribution of
weapons to everyone. We have to talk about the
Great Awakening. This is Jonathan Haidt's term.
Around 2012, we see a massive spike in terms
like privilege, microaggression, and oppression
in media usage. Right. This coincided with the
rise of social media. Young progressives started
using these platforms to call out injustice.
Cancel culture. Depending on who you ask, yes.
It was a new form of activism. And it produced
a reaction. The own the libs phenomenon. This
is crucial. Political analyst Nicole Hemmer points
out that owning the libs became a substitute
for actual ideology. How so? During the Cold
War, conservatives had cohesive policy platforms
about taxes or foreign policy. Today, for many
online, the platform is the anger of the opponent.
If the liberals are mad, I must be doing something
right. Exactly. Anger of the other side is the
victory condition. It's effective polarization.
It's based on feelings, not policy. I vote for
the guy who makes the people I hate scream. And
pop culture became the battlefield. We have to
talk about Gamergate. 2014 is a year that lives
in infamy for Internet historians. I remember
it happening, and I remember being so confused.
It was about video game journalism ethics. Ostensibly.
That was the cover story. Yeah. But really, it
was a test run for the modern political landscape.
It was a backlash by a group of mostly young,
white, male gamers against what they saw as the
intrusion of feminist and progressive values
into their hobby. Keep politics out of my games.
Right. But the reaction was incredibly toxic.
Harassment, doxing, death threats against female
developers and critics. It was a mob. And this
is where Steve Bannon enters the chat. Steve
Bannon, who was running Breitbart News at the
time and would go on to run Donald Trump's campaign,
looked at Gamergate. And he didn't see a bunch
of angry kids. He saw a gold mine. He saw an
army. He literally said, you can come in through
Gamergate and then get turned on to politics
and Trump. He realized that these young men felt
displaced. They felt like their culture was being
taken away. So he could harness that grievance.
And weaponize it politically. It's terrifyingly
brilliant. You take people's passions, their
movies, their games, their Star Wars, and you
turn that passion into political rage. And because
people care more about their hobbies than they
do about the marginal tax rate. It works. Pop
culture is the last front. That's why we fight
about the Little Mermaid or Barbie now. It's
all part of the war. OK, we've been very U .S.
centric so far, but as we promised in the intro,
this is a global disease. Let's look at the global
fronts. Segment six. Let's start with Australia
because they have something they explicitly call
the history wars. I found this fascinating. It
was a battle between two prime ministers. Yes.
In the 90s and early 2000s. Paul Keating from
the Labor Party versus John Howard from the Liberal
National Coalition. And the battlefield was the
country's origin story. What was the disagreement?
Keating wanted to face the dark past. He gave
the famous Redfern Park speech, admitting that
white settlers committed murders, stole land,
and stole children from Aboriginal families.
He wanted a clear -eyed view of history. Okay.
And Howard? John Howard pushed back hard. He
coined the term Black Armband History. He said,
I don't want Australians wearing a black armband
of mourning forever. We should be proud of our
achievements. And he refused to apologize. He
refused to issue an official apology to the stolen
generations. He used a phrase that we hear in
the U .S. all the time now regarding reparations.
Intergenerational guilt. Right. I didn't do it.
He argued that current Australians shouldn't
feel guilty for the sins of their ancestors.
And this war is still hot in Australia. Extremely.
Just recently, in 2023, they had the voice referendum,
a vote to give indigenous people a constitutional
voice in parliament. It failed. Wow. And the
rhetoric around it was pure culture war. We're
also seeing a backlash against welcome to country
ceremonies, which are like land acknowledgments.
And in Australia, climate change is part of this
too, right? Oh, hugely. In Australia, accepting
climate science is seen by the right as a sign
of being a city elite. It's a badge of identity
to deny it. It's not about the thermometer. It's
about whose team you were on. Let's hop to Europe.
What does the culture war look like there? In
Europe, it's often about memory laws. Meaning
the government legislating how you remember history?
Yes. Look at Poland. The Law and Justice Party.
P .S. passed laws that effectively criminalized
the phrase Polish death camps. Right. They wanted
to ensure the narrative was that Poland was solely
a victim of Nazi Germany, never a collaborator.
Even though history is messy and there were collaborators.
Correct. But the state wants a clean nationalist
narrative. We were the hero's victims. And we
see this with statues, too. Statues are flashpoints
everywhere. In the U .K., you had the statue
of slave trader Edward Colston thrown into the
harbor. In Poland, in Ukraine, they are tearing
down Soviet war memorials. Which is complicated,
right, because the Soviets drove out the Nazi.
Exactly. Some older generations see those statues
as symbols of liberation from Hitler, but younger
nationalists see them as symbols of Soviet oppression.
A different kind of occupation. Yes. In Ukraine,
de -Russification is in full swing renaming streets,
removing Lenin. It's a war over public space.
Who gets to stand at the town square? Who owns
the past owns the future. It's true. Even in
Vienna recently, they rejected a monument to
a Polish king, Jan Sobieski, who saved Vienna
from the Ottomans in 1683. Why? He's a hero in
Vienna, isn't he? It was. But the city government
feared that putting up a statue of a Christian
king fighting the Turks would be used to incite
Islamophobia and anti -Turkish sentiment today.
So history is held hostage by current politics.
Always. Now, the most disturbing global example
on our stack, I think, is Africa. Because this
isn't just organic conflict. This looks like
an export. Political scientist Constance G. Anthony
calls it neocolonialism. That's a heavy word.
How does she justify that? She argues that the
U .S., specifically U .S. conservatives, exported
their culture war to Africa. Ow. Money and strings
attached to aid. Under the Bush administration,
HIV is relief. PEPFAR was often tied to evangelical
leadership and abstinence -only programs. Okay.
Then, under Obama, aid was sometimes tied to
LGBTQ tolerance. So African nations became a
proxy battlefield for American policy fights.
Yes. And the result has been intense polarization.
Zambian scholars argue that American religious
conservatives, feeling like they were losing
the battle on gay marriage in the U .S., poured
resources into Africa to hold the line there.
So they are fighting the war in Uganda because
they lost in New York. Essentially. And they
frame it as resisting a Western gay agenda, which
is deeply ironic because the anti -gay rhetoric
is often imported from the Western Christian
right. It's a hall of mirrors. It is. And now
we see disinformation flooding West Africa. Kuminon
theories, anti -vax conspiracies, studies show
this is being pushed by American, French, and
pro -Russian actors. So a guy in Nigeria is reading
QAnon theories that were invented to influence
a swing voter in Michigan. It's a globalized
marketplace of outrage. OK, bring it back to
the present day. Segment seven. What is on the
laundry list right now? If we look at the map
today, where are the fires burning? It's a rapid
fire list. Gender and sexuality are number one.
Trans rights, drag queens, story hours. The term
groomer has been weaponized to conflate education
with abuse. Then education. Critical race theory.
Book bans or expurgation, as some are calling
it. The homeschooling movement, which is about
withdrawing from the corrupt public system. And
public health. We can't ignore what happened
during COVID. The mask. The mask became the ultimate
culture war symbol. Oh, yeah. It ceased to be
a piece of fabric to stop a virus. It became
a uniform. If you wore it, you were a liberal
sheep. If you didn't, you were a selfish conservative.
I remember the governor of North Dakota, Doug
Burgum, literally begging people to stop making
masks a senseless culture war issue. He was almost
crying. And it didn't work. Because once the
machine decides something is a symbol, logic
leaves the room. This feeds into what the sources
call the feedback loop. Right. A 2023 study showed
that disinformation actors know we are primed
to fight. So they intentionally toss in polarizing
claims, fake stories, exaggerated outrage, because
they know we will pick them up. We use the lies
as rhetorical ammunition. Exactly. We parrot
the disinformation because it helps us win the
argument. The utility of the lie is more important
than the truth of the lie. That is grim. It is.
But recognizing it is the first step. So let's
try to land this plane. We've been on a journey.
Bismarck's Prussia, the Roaring Twenties, the
Cold War vacuum, Gamergate. The global export
to Africa, it's a massive, sprawling beast. It
is. But if we synthesize all of this, if we try
to find the so what, what is the takeaway for
the listener? For me, the takeaway is that culture
war is rarely just about the issue on the surface.
It is a political technology. It is a tool used
to create in -groups and out -groups. When policy
differences aren't enough to unite a base or
when the world gets too complex, you manufacture
a cultural threat. It's about identity. It's
about saying, I am this kind of person and that
person over there is an existential threat to
my way of life. And in a world of information
overload, that binary friend versus enemy is
a very comforting way to organize the world.
It's simpler than dealing with complex tax codes
or health care tradeoffs. It feels good to be
a soldier in a righteous war. So here is the
provocative final thought for our listeners to
mull over today. We've established that this
is a machine. It's driven by elites, amplified
by algorithms and funded by special interests.
Right. So if the culture war is a tool used to
consolidate. power or attention? At what point
does participating in it stop being a defense
of your values and start being just a manipulation
of your identity? That is the question. Are you
fighting for what you believe in? Or are you
just a foot soldier in someone else's strategy
game? Next time you see that outrage bait in
your feed, maybe pause. Look for the strings.
Look for the culture cams. Stay skeptical. Thank
you for listening to The Deep Dive. Stay curious,
stay critical, and we'll see you next time. Goodbye.