What even is the culture war anyways? Just wanted to ask. Especially when Trump is apparently us involved somehow, I don't even know at this point. There's too much stuff happening. And of course the left wants to make 1984 a reality, jesus christ I hate the left so much.
Oh fucking sweet summer child.....
Culture War is a term used to describe the idea that culture defines society and whoever fucking controls the culture (in this case, pop culture), controls society and decides what is acceptable and what is forbidden/evil.
The idea has existed for ages, but it was conservative Christians who mainstreamed the phase due to them being pissy that Christian values weren't the bedrock of pop culture and that all sorts of taboo shit (sex, violence, drugs, profanity, anti-religion beliefs, abortion, etc) were suddenly becoming mainstream and acceptable starting in the late 1960s. It amped up in the 80s and 90s, when the GOP discovered that culture war shit could get the religious right to rally around Republican candidates and keep them in power.
In those days, it was the LEFT who were trying to stop the censors, who were right wingers and conservative Christians. The left ended up winning the culture war but for a while under Bush II, they were in the wilderness in that they controlled the culture but not the political and that is why the left went full fascist under Obama because they realized that they need BOTH and used culture to silence ALL dissent and ended up becoming just as bad if not WORSE than the Conservative Christians that they spent years shitting on during the pre-Obama Culture Wars.
It's also why they keep losing to Trump and why the left's grip on culture in general is slipping HARD and why media companies that make movies/tv shows/books have been seeing their profits crash hard as far as not bringing in the money they used to. Even though they won the culture war, they REFUSE outright REFUSE to acknowledge or accept that Trump ISN'T a fundie Christian or Neocon, that the left used to fight in the culture war. Trump is an entirely different beast and that is why they keep losing. Combined with the denial that they now are the status quo and NOT the rebel set they used to be, has led to them losing their grip on culture and is resulting in them going full salt the earth on pop culture, since if they can't control it then they will destroy it for everyone out of spite.
Depending on how you want to count things, we're on our 3rd or 4th KKK. The original KKK was officially disbanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest when the organization he founded to chase a white man out of Tennessee was being used to terrorize people who had nothing to do with getting fucking yankees out of the south, and declared an illegal organization. Individual Klaverns disobeyed the order and went under ground until the 1900s, where there was massive resurgenced until the 1940s when a combination of WWII and internal corruption caused the organization to implode and go back underground until the 1960s; at this point the real threat to the KKK was legal. This precludes any centralized national leadership. So the KKK now exists as small independent organizations; there is no national leadership to go after, despite the fact these individual small orgs are collaborating and in a few cases dissolving and reforming when legal issues arise to frustrate any attempts to take assets and disrupt operations.
The second generation KKK has a hilarious story of how it rose and fell. The Klan was pretty much dead until the mid-1910s, when Birth of a Nation came out. The film basically created "Klan-Mania", especially after Woodrow Wilson held one of the film's first screenings at the White House, making the film super trendy. Wilson even endorsed the film's take on Reconstruction and the KKK (describing it as "history written with lightning"), after seeing it, giving the narrative of the film extra credibility.
It spawned "Klan Mania", as people in the South formed new chapters of the Klan in the wake of the film's release, which quickly organized into a national network. One chief difference in the second generation KKK (not present in the first incarnation of the KKK but carried over to later revivals) was that it expanded it's list of hated subjects from just blacks to include Jews and Catholics, along with anti-prohibitionist supporters and loose women; especially loose women who consorted with blacks and drank.
Not just poor racists joined but also wealthy elites and political officials, as the KKK became a social club for the politically connected to join. It's where the cliched "Good Old Boys Club" came into being and that in a lot of towns and cities which were controlled by the Democrats, you couldn't even get elected dog catcher unless you were a part of the Klan. To the extent that you had shit like Harry Truman being a KKK member, as he had to join the Klan just to be able to have a political career and quickly abandoned said membership once he garnered enough political power to do so without any retribution from the KKK for leaving.
The Klan ultimately fell due to a sex scandal where one of the national leaders of the KKK got caught kidnapping, raping, and murdering a woman. The sordid details of the crime (which included him holding her prisoner as a sex slave, biting her flesh like an animal as part of his demented idea of foreplay, and other degrading sexual violations) and the revelation that the top brass of the KKK were secret drunks (in spite of the image of them being 100% anti-drink) and sexual deviants who whored around in private, decimated the Klan's public image of being "protectors against degeneracy" they presented publicly. Adding to this, the leader in question outright DOXED every known Klansman in his state, releasing their names to the press as retaliation for the Democrat governor basically told him to fuck off when he begged said governor to void his conviction via pardon.
The scandals and the fallout decimated the second generation KKK, which never fully recovered from the scandal.
![[Redacted]-san](http://uploads.kiwifarms.st/data/avatars/l/25/25303.jpg?1623991751){kind=avatar}
