Editor’s Note: Have a question about what the hell our “national strategic crypto reserve” is supposed to be? Don’t ask Matt. He doesn’t understand fake money, even if he tries to pass off a homemade gift certificate entitling his wife “to a night of animal lovemaking” each Valentine’s Day in lieu of actual presents. Any other questions? Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com.

Dear Matt,
I can’t stand to watch the news anymore. So I kind of lost track. Who’s winning the culture war?
Fatigued in Phoenix

Not us, Fatigued, if I may be so bold to call you by your first name. And by “us,” I mean the few, the proud, the endangered normies, who can’t stand everything being politicized until we beg for our moms or a pentobarbital injection — whichever is more accessible. I’m admittedly a sentimentalist by nature, so am capable of nostalgizing the past even while it’s still the present. But I am now officially nostalgic not for some fabled era of good government — which probably never existed — but for an era when I didn’t have to think about government much at all. Sober people with solid haircuts and slightly above room-temperature IQs just sort of governed and shut up about it. Whether they succeeded or didn’t, they looked at their job as running their fiefdoms peaceably and semi-competently, instead of waking up each day to figure out which half of the country they could wage culture war on, as if they were getting paid by the alienated citizen.

A long time ago, I was friends with the late Andrew Breitbart. Before he was late, and before he became ANDREW BREITBART, X-TREME CULTURE WARRIOR! When I first met him, he was mainly just a lovable, if hyper-intense, merry prankster, who might say, cheerfully rollerblade into a crowd of hostile protesters. He once asked me to teach him how to fly fish when his doctor told him he needed to decelerate his stress levels. Then he thought the better of it, admitting, “Every time I see a tree, I just want to kick its ass.” (I love trees, myself, but points for honesty.) I remember the time Andrew called me, repeating a phrase he’d recently coined and seemed quite proud of, that “politics is downstream from culture.”

I’m guessing he’d be pleased that every yutz in the commentariat, striving to wrap their arms around the current chaos, now parrots his line as if they’re uncorking some blindingly original insight. And don’t get me wrong, it was a fine insight at the time. But I think it’s outlived its usefulness. Because politics is no longer downstream from culture. Politics IS the culture. Don’t believe me? Think of any area of your life that hasn’t just remained untouched by politics, but that has actively been deformed by it — whether it’s your religion, sports, entertainment, or family relations. If politics were a retail outlet, it’d be 7-Eleven: always open, kind of filthy, catering to cheap sugar highs and to people who think roller dogs are edible, and forever susceptible to being held up at gunpoint by society’s worst elements.

I know most readers will assume I’m blaming the right, and they’re right. Because I came of age as a rightist, and therefore, had a ringside seat to watching the right go deeply, seriously wrong. But let’s not let lefties entirely off the hook either. Even well before their wokester witch hunts of the twenty-teens, they inflicted plenty of culture-war stupidity on government. Back in 2009, I covered a government diversity derby in Orlando — I used to cover plenty of such moronic spectaculars — for which I set the table with the historical context of the time:

…..the substantive civil rights activists of the Fifties and Sixties gave way to more opportunistic social-science dabblers, the gender-studies Ponytailiban, and the encounter-group enthusiasts who were too underqualified to find employment as pet hypnotists or Dollar Store cashiers, and so hung out their shingles as diversity consultants, gouging corporations for thousands of dollars a day. They’d herd confused employees into games of ‘access and legitimacy’ dodgeball or have them make entries in their White Privilege journals or lead consciousness-raising singalongs of ‘Everyday People’ with the diversity trainer accompanying on autoharp. Diversity training became the corporate equivalent of a flu shot: Nobody was sure it worked, but it made bosses feel accomplished and proactive. Attendance was often mandatory, particularly if your company, like Denny’s or Texaco, had faced discrimination litigation. If they hadn’t, they’d have diversity training anyway, as indemnification in case they later did.

The whole ridiculous spectacle was captured brilliantly in the “Diversity Day” episode of The Office:

…..in which Michael Scott, the clueless Caucasian manager of the Scranton branch office of a paper company, has to see his troops undergo diversity training after he performed an n-word-laden Chris Rock routine (‘How come Chris Rock can do a routine and everybody finds it hilarious and groundbreaking; then I go do the same exact routine, same comedic timing, and people file a complaint to corporate?’). Feigning the enthusiasm he thinks his overlords want to see (‘I wish every day was diversity day’), he tries to muscle the diversity trainer aside and take over the proceedings himself. ‘Why don’t we go around,’ says Michael, ‘and everybody, EVERYBODY, say a race that you are attracted to sexually. I will go last.’ Throughout corporate America, adults were infantilized, intelligence was insulted. Few escaped humiliation even if the extent of their participation was merely bearing witness.

But my own subjects, attendees of the National Multicultural Business Conference, all participating in and/or competing for the Small Business Association’s 8(a) Business Development Program — essentially a golden ticket designation for minority/disadvantaged types to procure government contracts over their competitors — would actually introduce themselves at cocktail parties as being from say, the Native Hawaiian Veterans LLC. Which wasn’t running bus tours at Pearl Harbor, as the name suggests, but setting up security systems at the State Department. Its proprietor introduced himself to me, as casually as if he were handing me a business card, as, “I’m Hawaiian and I’m Cherokee! Actually, there’s four total designations: 8(a), Small Disadvantaged Business Status, Service-Disabled Veteran Status, and uhhh, what’s the other one? Native status!”

“Disadvantage,” it turns out, had its advantages.

But of course, as is the rule in our current politics, for every stupid action, there is an equal and opposite stupid reaction. Often, even stupider. Witness Defense Secretary/former weekend Fox and Friends host, Pete Hegseth — a man who is even oilier than his hair. Determined to wage war not on Russia or China, but rather, a culture war on his own Pentagon, Young Pete is hellbent on scrubbing our warfighters of anything that might smack of DEI. (Can our Special Forces even still run “Black Ops”? Or is the “black” prefix too woke?)

Hence, as the Associated Press recently reported (fresh off of being banned from covering the White House for not going along with His Majesty’s Ministry of Truth edict that the Gulf of Mexico shall now be called the “Gulf of America”), Greasy Pete ordered the military to cull anything that smacks of DEI content from its photo archives, with 26,000 images flagged for removal, and which one official said could end up seeing as many as 100,000 images being purged.

Among the “offensive” content? Well apparently, a photo of the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, has to go. (Not for incinerating tens of thousands of civilians, but because “gay” is right there in the bomber’s moniker.) Likewise, a photo of Army Corps biologists made the list, seemingly, AP said, “because it mentioned they were recording data about fish — including their weight, size, hatchery and gender.” Gender being a wokester concern!

How snowflaky can you get? Well, a Pentagon spokesman explained that Secretary Hegseth had declared that “DEI is dead.” So that settles it, I guess? Apparently, common sense is dead, too.

But this is the arms race that culture warriors forever participate in. (It is a war without end.) As they try to bludgeon half the population into submission, using their very necessary jobs to carry out very unnecessary grudges. Issues that would perhaps best be kept between them and their therapists.

It’s enough to make a normie yearn for World War III. Sure, all the death and deprivation would suck. But at least we’d (finally) be up against real enemies, instead of imaginary ones.

Bonus Track: Speaking of dirty little wars, here’s a song I’ve always liked, appropriately called, “Dirty Little War,” by Will Hoge. One of the best songs ever written about divorce — as in the marital variety, not national divorce. There’s some nice off-camera slide guitar on it, and you have to respect Hoge, who manages to pull off a fine vocal without ever spitting out his gum.