It's funny I thought growing up, the fear of communists in government and media was just a dumb right wing conspiracy. Now we're living through it.
The Republican party really, really fucked up during the Bush years when millennials were all developing a political identity. The obvious issue is the Iraq war, but culturally, the Republican party did nothing but cater to dinosaurs. They held onto dying causes and really offer nothing to youth. That's another reason why Trump won, he never pretended he gave a shit about gays marrying, marijuana, never made believable overtures to Evangelicals, all of that shit. He wasn't the stuffy conservative the GOP churns out.. The Republican party, at least before Trump, kept reaching out to the religious right and making absolutely zero in-roads to youth. Instead, Republicans complained about demons on Magic: The Gathering and grounded their children for playing Dungeons & Dragons. Liberals were closer to the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll all the cool kids love. That's why that annoying creepy narcissistic insincere huckster Milo Yiannopolous ever had an audience.
With Trump, we got an actual real human being and not a cardboard cutout of a human being. The left tries to smear him with his boorish sexual boasting, but in the end I feel like it really helped his image. Blue collar "
titties 'n beer" types that aren't exactly street punks but also aren't altar boys probably loved being able to vote for an actual MAN. Trump's a bullshitter, but he doesn't hide his core personality, didn't even make an effort to.
Gay marriage was a huge issue that brought a lot of millennial teens into the civil rights LARPing stuff. The laws were pretty stupid and everyone knew it, as secretly did the Republicans. Why do you know the Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade but not the one that mandated states accept homosexual marriage? Because the Republicans don't contest it because they didn't care either. They legitimately do care about abortion as they believe it is the murder of a human life. The Republicans handed the left the ability to make themselves look like civil rights heroes (cautiously; even Obama was chickenshit and said he didn't believe in gay marriage. Trump beat him to that!) and we've been dealing with that degeneracy ever since.
It was either uncool uptight religious right types or the lamest, most milquetoast, "safe for East Coast Elite consumption" Mitt Romney types. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney's nomination likely got the fire smoldering inside the Republican party that allowed Trump to win, if it wasn't that it was the Ron Paul craze that went on way back. Romney is a moderate religious Christian liberal more than he could honestly be called a republican. I actually would have agreed a lot on Romney socially, except he couldn't even take bold stances on those fronts, and his economic policies I found distasteful.
Of course, Trump also addressed issues nobody was willing to take a stance on. Immigration and trade. That made a lot of conservatives very happy, particularly the law and order crowd and people concerned either with China itself or America's trade deals. Most Republicans do nothing Republican, they do not lower taxes, they do nothing about social security, they have no problem with Chinese influence, they think law and order is harsher sentences for people caught with wacky weed instead of improving policing and crime in high-crime areas.
Even the alt right and WNs consist of huge fucking pot heads (don't fucking deny it guys). The vast, vast majority of millennials, probably most of us here, even at KiwiFarms, have moved to what people say is "socially liberal." Millennial right wing youth have a much greater libertarian leaning.
So, back to the main point: we don't have any real conservatives in media or anywhere to fight back on this because for far too long the Republican party made themselves simply very, very, very uncool. The left, with the media, seized Millennial public opinion. The Republican party needs to rebrand itself and not come off as an angry disapproving nun in a convent. Nobody wants that anymore. You can be "sex drugs and rock'n'roll" without being a complete degenerate. Ian Curtis of Joy Division was a Tory! Roger Daltrey is pro-Brexit and generally pretty moderate! I could go on about more of them and how all the original rock and roll stars even today aren't socialists or even necessarily on the left. Conservatives need more Ted Nugent types. How many rockers/rock 'n roll types were really super far left? Those people weren't hippies. And maybe one day, people predisposed to the left might realize that "sex, drugs, rock 'n roll" doesn't mean doing snorting dried cum and molly off a transpenis in a port-a-potty at an EDM festival. The right wing made themselves absolutely unpalatable to Millennials. The Republican party has been reparing itself slowly from the religious right but not fast enough.
Here's hoping the Democrats are making themselves unpalatable to Gen Z. I'm not optimistic, though culture is increasingly becoming based online and I feel that there's the embers of a new counter-culture starting to glow.
