Thread by @_kruptos

1. I am becoming increasingly convinced that a free, largely unregulated, modern mass entertainment media is incompatible with a society that values liberty and self-government. What has changed my mind is binge watching Grey’s Anatomy with my wife.

2. As I noted on my recent appearance on the @giantgio podcast Content Minded, I recently let my wife actually pick what we were going to watch and she saw some meme about Grey’s Anatomy and wanted to find the episode, couldn’t and just decided to watch it

3. So here I find myself watching episode after episode of Grey’s Anatomy with my wife, a show designed around relationship drama for a largely female audience. It runs 18 seasons. It has been instructive. Everything we are seeing in the culture war, they told us it was coming.

4. My wife and I are fairly immune to the propaganda, as we have a well developed Christian worldview and moral framework. But make no mistake, this show is pure propaganda for the left, woke, mindset. They teach you first of all about feminism. Feminism is glorious for women.

5. Women sleep around, have multiple partners within the same friend group and within the working environment largely without personal cost. They are all doctors, so there is no financial price to pay. The women choose their careers over husband and children.

6. Women’s needs always come first. Always. A woman never needs to choose or to sacrifice her ambitions and whatever choice she makes is the right choice for her. Of course, there is a lesbian relationship. And of course her conservative Catholic Christian parents struggle.

7. But dad comes around and puts his love for his daughter ahead of right and wrong. The Christians in the story are all narrow minded and hateful. Either that or they are put through emotional meat grinders which push them to ask the liberal question, “How could God do this?”

8. Never mind that it’s the wrong question, as the evil in the world stems from man’s disobedience of God’s commands and the transgression of the boundaries he set for us. Every problem is portrayed as a question of God’s love, as if his sacrifice did not demonstrate his love.

9. Recently, there was an episode about changing “genders.” It was the full court propaganda press. He knew since he was five (Really? Five?). He is in the hospital because he used dangerous street hormones (back street abortions with coat hangers 2.0?).

10. Immediately the doctors all jump on board accepting his new identity in defiance of what their eyes can see. They use the pronouns. They care. They offer to make the process safe. Here is the thing, on TV of course this “transition” will work.

11. The stories on TV always work so that the answer to every problem is always more left woke liberalism and some technical solutions or government program that always succeeds (Hello: West Wing). It’s no wonder people think the government needs to do something about everything

12. It’s no wonder people think that men can become women. They have been seeing it on TV for years. Things always work out on TV. So people who question “transitioning” in real life are just like the hateful bigots on TV trying to prevent this miracle of modern medicine.

13. Here is where the crunch comes for conservatives and members of the right. A society of liberty, small government, self-government, a conservative society that holds to traditional values, can’t hold onto those values under the full court press of the propaganda machine.

14. Some of us, a small few, are able the kind of detachment necessary to hold onto themselves while reading Feuerbach and Nietzsche. Even for us it can be hard. Just as for a tiny segment of the population, they can somehow make free wheeling libertinism work for them.

15. But for the vast majority of the population these kinds of explorations and lifestyles are destructive and dangerous. They need someone to tell them how to believe and how to live. The left understands that. This is why they use these powerful storytelling mechanisms.

16. Do you really believe that we live in a society where ideas are freely exchanged when the vast majority of the population thinks the historical dramas they see on TV are how things actually happened?

17. But what if free speech, you argue? What of freedom of the press? The problem is that these ideals, these universals, cannot survive, cannot be instantiated in a world of mass media.

19. This is one of the inherent contradictions within the democratic system. It is something that Carl Schmitt observed. People are not born naturally democratic and liberty loving. They are not born with the skills, knowledge and character to be free, democratic citizens.

20. You must be taught to be free. Someone has to train you and teach you how to conduct yourself in a democratic society. This requires an educational dictatorship to achieve. A society wide commitment to democratic instruction and messaging. apokekrummenain.substack.com/p/carl-schmitt…

21. This means that if you want to keep the America that your mind tells you America should be, it means either eliminating or controlling the mass media and social media of the country, and the schools, so that they teach the kind of values that encourage a country of liberty.

22. Because right now they are being raised and taught how to live in a left liberal woke country. They are being taught hardline feminism, homosexuality, transgenderism and more. Day in, day out. And the vast majority of people are not capable of holding on to themselves.

23. What of free speech? What of it? It was always an idea that could never be instantiated. There are always rules within which speech occurs. People don’t have free speech now. Maybe they need to be taught how to speak freely? There are no easy answers.

24. But I can tell you this, a naive and misguided idea of free speech is currently allowing the enemies of America destroy it from within through a constant bombardment of propaganda. You can hold onto those misguided unrealizable universals and lose your country, …

25. …or you can do something about it, take a bold step to take away the weapons of your political enemies, the weapons they use to undermine everything you hold sacred and important.