Politics is downstream from culture-Andrew Breitbart
That quote by the late great Andrew Breitbart is one of the biggest reasons this podcast and blog exists.
On this show I’ve often spoken about the significance of culture and how cultural manipulation is something that is constantly at play within the makeup of our society.
I’ve clearly pointed this out by coining the phrase The Crime Syndicate of Narrative with one of my past episodes here outlining a very specific history of our media landscape along with how propaganda is often interwoven into the fabric of our media for the purpose of social engineering. By the way if you haven’t listened to that episode I strongly suggest you sign up as a member to do so because it will shock you.
I’m a GenX’er so I grew up as a kid in the 1980’s and that period in the eighties was considerably different from this current period we’re living in terms of our culture and the overall mood of our society.
However, there were some parallels, but the circumstances of our economic and societal health today are much much worse. There’s significant historical context associated with this and today is the perfect time to dive into this so you can be reminded of just how different the now is from the then.
So what do I mean?
First of all, I was only five years of age when president Ronald Reagan came into office. At that time Jimmy Carter, who was from my home state of Georgia, was the president just prior to Reagan and had managed to run the country into the ground with inflation, energy shortages, and absurd bureaucratic and environmental policies that caused fuel rations where people had to alternate which days of the week they could buy gas at the gas pump.
Reagan won the election in a huge overwhelming landslide victory with Carter only carrying three states of which his, and my, home state of Georgia ended up being one of those three states. The country then, like now, was facing some difficult times, but once Reagan got into office things were about to skyrocket and the eighties were about soar high putting the country in top form for more than the next decade to come.
Even though I’ve somewhat teed up a recap of Reagan's successful presidency I want to clarify something here first. Reagan did a wonderful job as president and he deserves a lot of credit for driving the change in the environment of Washington D.C. at the time that he served in office.
However there’s another major piece to this puzzle I want to point out that in one specific way makes this current environment a drastically different ball game altogether. The big difference that Reagan didn’t have to deal with in D.C. at the time versus what we’re currently dealing with now in the Federal government has to do with the current Communist infiltration of the CCP internally within our own federal government.
As good as Reagan was he did not have to deal with a weaponized media, a weaponized DOJ, and a large-scale influence peddling operation that we now know exists within D.C. in this present day, in particular with the current ruling regime in office and their business dealings with the CCP.
Yes, Reagan was a great president, but his problems were limited to being mostly coming from the external with the enemies that he had to confront compared to the enemies of Donald Trump here in 2023 that are very much domestic. That is not opinion, but an objective fact.
If that’s not obvious enough it was just this past week, and ironically enough on our July 4th Independence Day, that a federal judge in Louisiana restricted the Biden regime from communicating and coordinating with social media platforms about online content in their effort to censor content.
In this ruling Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. The District Court for the Western District of Louisiana stated that the FBI and Department of Health and Human Services could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” (Source: The New York Times)
Furthermore, The New York Times article goes on to talk about how the judge threw down even harder on the Biden regime by quoting Judge Doughty as saying “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the judge said. “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.”
This is the sort of thing you see in Communist countries and third world Banana Republics, yet here it is right here in our backyard on U.S. soil in 2023.
In short, the landscape now is a bit different with the domestic enemies we’re having to contend with versus the 1980’s. This is a salient point I wanted to take the time to address to offer perspective before getting into the topic of today’s discussion.
Enter Paul Volcker
In the 70’s inflation had risen to a whopping 15% and by 1980 as a result rolled the red victory carpet out for President Ronald Reagan. (Source: USA Today)
With inflation raging out of control under the previous presidency with Carter it was still a problem that Reagan had to address.
Keep in mind there are a few things that can cause inflation such as a supply shortage coupled with high demand which was occurring in the energy sector at that time. After all, energy is the lifeblood of the economy and with the demand for it being high and the supply of it being low it drives the price of everything through the roof. Sound familiar?
Regardless, how was Reagan supposed to deal with this very sticky and very contentious problem with the American public?
Well this is where the Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker entered into the picture. Paul Volcker was a towering man both in personality and in stature as all 6’ 7” of him would shift the mood of the room whenever he would walk through the door.
He was a towering figure in Washington D.C. not just because of his physical height, but in addition to his physical height he had in those days what we would refer to as a steel infused spine, maintaining a strong discipline towards principle regardless of the political pressures that would be coming towards him like an anxious 800 lb. gorilla.
Why is this you ask?
To try and understand, take a moment and try to put yourself in Volcker’s shoes. Here you had the largest economy on the planet with the United States of America facing down the worst inflation crisis the country has ever seen in its history up to that point. On top of that you just had a new president sworn into office and you had an economy that was a complete dumpster fire dropped right into your lap from the previous administration.
Yet, despite all of this Volcker was determined to vanquish this inflation once and for all, but he knew in order to do it he was going to have to wreck the economy even more in order to wring the inflation completely out of the system. The good news was that he had the support of the new president and Reagan would not stand in his way.
How did he do this?
He did this by walking in with both barrels blazing (metaphorically speaking) and blowing up interest rates all the way to 20%. You’ve got to understand that this precipitated the steepest economic downturn in history at the time since the Great Depression. (Source: USA Today)
Volcker knew the country had to take its medicine in order to get better on the other side of the inflation and that dose of medicine wasn’t going to be pleasant, not in the least. In fact, the rate hikes resulted in unemployment soaring to a whopping 11% in 1981-1982, but in 1983 the heartbeat of the United States economic engine started pumping strong again.
Volcker had worked in the private sector and the federal government as a banker and he knew that in order to choke out the inflation he would have to push the interest rates sky high beyond head and shoulders above the rest. This would be no easy task and the burden was a heavy one to carry because he knew the workers would feel the pain in the short term, but the economy would be roaring once the nation could endure through the pain of the couple of years that followed and that’s exactly what happened.
In 1982 Volcker was able to start lowering interest rates as inflation had plummeted and he saw some significant relief in unemployment.
To back up a bit and to shed some light on the political pressure, a good concrete example of this here was that Reagan’s Chief of Staff James Baker had, according to Volcker in his later years, suggested that he keep interest rates low leading up to the 1984 election.
Volcker had not intended on raising them anyways due to the economic strength of the country at that point, but the political influence was trying to worm its way into the Fed Chairman’s decisions.
Sound familiar?
Yes, it’s the sort of thing we’re seeing now with the politicization of the Federal Reserve with Jerome Powell having done the opposite of Volcker by delaying the interest rate hikes so as to delay the economic pain of the country due to the rising inflation from all the money that was printed during the pandemic for stimulus and afterwards predominantly by the Biden regime.
The Fed had raised rates for the first time in three years prior on Wednesday March 16, 2022 over two years from the time Biden had been sworn into office and started proposing revving up the printing press once again for the almighty dollar. (Source: CNBC) However, unlike the situation that Volcker found himself in, the current environment concerning inflation is significantly more serious for the country right now.
How is that you ask?
Well first of all, the balance sheet on the national debt in 1980 was a mere $914 billion compared to the out of control and terrifying current national debt of $32+ Trillion and counting. (Source: Treasurydirect.gov & USdebtclock.org) In addition to this the U.S. in 1980 was a manufacturing powerhouse unlike today where a significant portion of our manufacturing has been offshored to China and other parts of the world.
So here’s the terrifying reality pill for you to swallow. We now have more than 32 times the amount of national debt combined with inflation on an economy that’s seriously handicapped with its ability to produce goods to back up our economic engine.
Furthermore, we have an individual(s) in the office of the white house that, unlike Volcker and Reagan, have NEVER worked in the private sector and are clueless about creating true wealth. Therefore, all they care about doing is printing more money to give the economy a temporary sugar high before it comes crashing down. That’s the difference between now and what Volcker had to deal with in his time in 1980.
Essentially this is the current cultural environment we find ourselves in here in 2023. It’s the same problem, but unlike finding the solution in the 1980’s with Reagan and Volcker we have an entire Administrative State that’s out of control and fighting back internally against new outside leadership. They want to eliminate the possibility of any outside threat, like Donald Trump, to prevent him from coming in and taking a sledgehammer to the endless spending and corruption of the Administrative State which he’s already demonstrated and is now setting his sights on doing it again.
As Reagan pointed out in his debate with Carter when he got the chance he said the following…
"I think this idea that has been spawned here in our country, that inflation somehow came upon us like a plague and therefore it's uncontrollable and no one can do anything about it, is entirely spurious," he went on and said Carter “had blamed the people for inflation, OPEC, he's blamed the Federal Reserve System, he has blamed the lack of productivity of the American people, he has then accused the people of living too well and that we must share in scarcity, we must sacrifice and get used to doing with less. We don't have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well."(Source: Reason)
The Rise of The 1980’s
To refresh your memory, that quote I led off with at the beginning of this episode with Andrew Breitbart stating that Politics is downstream from culture could not be more on target than it was in the 1980’s.
You see as Volcker choked the inflation out of the system Reagan proceeded to cut taxes and bureaucracy within the federal government and that manufacturing base of the U.S. started revving up like a race car engine. As this happened the economy started roaring and the culture of American enterprise was feeding the pop culture while the pop culture was feeding it. America was the world’s Zenith and the world knew it.
So what exactly am I getting at?
I can tell you that the good strong leadership we had at the helm of the country was helping to fuel a culture of American pride that had been asleep, or more specifically suppressed, because of the drag the previous administration had placed onto the American people and the economy.
With the 1980’s you now also had a cultural explosion of the very celebrated American action hero. At this point you had the likes of the greatest action movies ever made that I grew up on as a young boy such as Rambo, Commando, Top Gun, Terminator, The Rocky movies, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Mad Max, Blood Sport, and I could go on and on.
Masculinity and Femininity in men and women were celebrated and it was carried out in the culture in a way that admittedly I don’t remember seeing ever since the 1980’s. Contrast that then with what we have now within our culture with putting Dylan Mulvaney on the front of a Bud Light can of beer.
Music was exploding with the likes of MTV coming into the picture on August 1, 1981. The introduction and popularity of the music video enabled bands to capture their audiences not only with their music, but with a visual display of their music vibe in the form of a video. Granted, MTV would eventually give birth to reality television which in my personal opinion was the beginning of the end for MTV, but for a while it was a wonderful product.
During this time you had all of the competition in every industry within entertainment, business, and on the global stage with Reagan putting communism on its back heel. For the most part the eighties were a time of national pride and a glorious growth of creativity and opportunity. The nation was more independently strong and there was no doubt that the U.S. was the international leader on the global stage.
There was peace and no cities were burning with endless domestic terrorist attacks from domestic terrorist groups that were funded by domestic U.S. citizens.There was no mass invasion on the borders the way we see today. There was no hesitation with our leaders stepping up and putting communist regimes in their place unlike today where we have U.S. leaders kowtowing to communist regimes, more specifically with the CCP…and mind you they are doing so with the CCP only 90 miles away from our Florida coast in Cuba.
This current situation is more dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis that President Kennedy had to deal with in 1962, but at that time at least Kennedy had locked himself in the situation room for weeks until that situation was resolved. However, ask yourself how much you’ve heard about this dangerous situation from your Administrative State Media (ASM), or did you just learn more about it right here on this show? My point is that all of this is a major contrast in the culture of the 1980’s compared to what we are dealing with today.
A Cultural Metamorphosis To Populism
Looking back it’s my interpretation that the 1980’s was the first sort of evidence of the rise of populism in the country’s more recent history. The era was birthed out of the desire and will of the people to finally be heard by their government which had up until that point not been listening and putting the country through unnecessary hardship due to people in power with flawed world views and terrible public policy decisions.
However, we could probably chalk up the 1970’s under Carter to being the result of a bit of an out of touch worldview combined with ignorance, however in this current day and age the issue is very much intentional.
Unlike now in the 1980’s there was a strong anti-Communist sentiment in the culture that was fueling the movement that kept the then Soviet Union on their back heels and ultimately led to the collapse of the Berlin wall in November of 1989. This resulted in more democratic momentum leading to the overthrow of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe, and ultimately with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in August 1991. (Source: Office of The Historian)
In case you weren’t clear on it, Populism is defined as a political approach to appeal to everyday citizens who feel that their concerns are completely disregarded by their government and the associated elite groups of people with authority and wealth.
The populist culture of the 1980’s resulted in the U.S rising to power and almost vanquishing Communism throughout most of the world. You see momentum in life can be both positive and negative.
Understanding that concept, the populist American pride and freedom that was so dominant in the 1980’s had caught fire and it built momentum creating downward pressure and causing the Communist regimes throughout the world to suffer from negative momentum until they eventually collapsed.
Contrast that with today and we have had an opposite circumstance on the global stage with Communism building positive momentum as freedom has been losing momentum throughout the western world.
In the 1980’s you had the advocacy of freedom being pushed through the economic culture, through the pop culture, and through the political culture which resulted in a vibrant and healthy freedom and liberty culture.
Contrast that with today and we have a Communist economic culture, a Marxist pop culture, and a CCP controlled Communist friendly political culture. If you don’t believe me, look at how much trade we do with a Communist regime to the point that we’ve offshored much of the manufacturing of our goods and products to that regime, ceding the control of that production to the CCP regime.
In my observation that never happened in the 1980’s and even more so Reagan was very much set against Communism and demonstrated that through his actions in his policies towards Communist regimes.
Now knowing this what other president in recent history do we know of that demonstrated those same actions towards dangerous rising Communist regimes?
I’ll give you a hint you don't have to look any further back in history than around 2016 with the start of the Donald Trump administration.
I guarantee you that Clinton, the Bush family, and Obama certainly didn’t do any of that. In fact, they all advocated hard for the globalist economic agenda which is basically a top down economic approach that has proven in the past three years to be very fascistic and Marxist in nature with the deplatforming, censorship, and debanking of individual U.S. citizens. This has proven to be very dangerous and is the bed we made and are having to sleep in now as a society.
Every single thing that I’ve mentioned here is documented fact. There is no doubt that we are facing a major threat of Communist infiltration within every institution of our country.
However, with that being said here’s the good news. I believe now as I sit here telling you all of this that the Populist movement within the citizenry of the United States, and throughout the world for that matter, has ascended once again.
The Wrap Up
After all, I started this very show to be one more voice to fuel the awakening and enlightenment that is occurring across the country and throughout the rest of the world right now. This growing unrelenting and overwhelming sentiment and desire towards freedom and liberty is catching fire more and more by the day as people are awakening to that reality.
Having said that, I feel really good about it, but given the current times we are living in, it's going to take a movement that is really on fire and huge in numbers and engagement in order to defeat this Communist attempt to take over the world.
This is why I have this show. I understand due to personal experience just how bad and how widespread this Communist pandemic can be since I got a taste of it myself three years ago with my own business.
This is the REAL pandemic and I just want to provide this platform for you to be one more overwhelming immune response to protect you and those you love from the Communist virus.
Just understand that nobody else is going to be flying in like an eighties action hero to save us. That hero we need is the one you see in the mirror everyday and I’m here to remind you of that fact and to get you to act on it.
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A Cultural Metamorphosis