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Is the Sleeping Conservative Dragon Finally Waking Up?

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst.

How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?

They don’t see much backing for the current wide-open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, yet it continues.

Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.

They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.

Certainly, Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.

In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.

Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.

How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them.

They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.

They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.

Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.

They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.

The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.

So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.

Yet suddenly they realize their apathy allowed the country to descend into something the nation’s founders never imagined or intended, and antithetical to what most knew as America just a couple of decades ago.

So conservatives are awakening from their slumber. And they are discovering that they too can boycott, agitate—and roar.

The woke Target corporation in just a few days has suffered a more than $10 billion loss in its stock value. Millions of shoppers shunned its 2,000 stores after the chain showcased its “pride” apparel. The displays featured “tuck pieces”—veritable cod pieces– that are intended to facilitate “women’s” male genitalia.

Anheuser-Busch came up with the bright idea that it would highlight Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender performance activist, to hawk its Bud Light brand. But beer seemed incidental to the self-absorbed Mulvaney’s fixation on promoting transgenderism.

So Bud Light-drinking, red-state America got turned off by Mulvaney’s in-your-face-advocacy.

An ensuing informal boycott cost the company nearly $16 billion in lost stock value. Hundreds of millions of dollars of unsellable light beer stagnated. Stores can’t even give it away. Meanwhile, Bud Light’s competitors coped with meeting record Memorial Day consumer demand.

Ditto the defiantly woke Disney Corporation.

The now politically activist entertainment corporation insisted on pushing woke agendas down the throats of its family-centered audience.

The result? Its online entertainment services are bleeding millions of subscribers. Disney stock has lost $16 billion in value. Its overpriced theme parks no longer count on continual increased attendance.

Sometimes traditionalists prefer simply to drop out rather than boycott wokeism. One result is that the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards now have a fraction of their previous televised audience.

In 1998—when the United States had a population of 275 million—the NBA finals earned on average 29 million television viewers. This year the NBA bragged its finals averaged a pathetic 4 million viewers in a contemporary America of 335 million.

The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team reinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—a self-identified performance art “queer” group—to headline the team’s “pride night.”

The all-male “Sisters” usually put on anti-Catholic pornographic skits that mock Jesus Christ and sexualize Christian rituals.

That Dodger indulgence is not going over well with its fan base, especially the city’s millions of Catholic Latinos.

The woke Left still enjoys enormous advantages over the Right. The bicoastal elite has far more money, controls all the major American institutions, and dominates the dissemination of knowledge through the media and Silicon Valley.

But the Left does not enjoy majority public support. And now it has managed the impossible—to goad the normally comatose conservative dragon to awaken.

And it is just starting to breathe fire.

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About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

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Notable Replies

  1. Professor Hanson, you are dead right that the good dragon is slowly awakening. I sensed the arousing almost two years ago. At a minimum, the good people in this magnificent republic need to do all they can to prevent the Communists from stealing the 5 or 6 key states next year.

  2. I sure hope Prof. Hanson is right.

  3. I don’t share Professor Hanson’s optimism that the “conservative dragon…is just starting to breathe fire.” Sure, causing woke corporations to lose a few billion in value is causing some indigestion among the elites, but it’s doubtful it will change much–other than some massaging of marketing themes and insincere feints from woke messaging.

    However, we will know for sure the conservative dragon is breathing fire when leftists, Ruling Class enablers, their defenders, protectors, and propagandists are worried about much, much more than woke corporate stock values.

  4. Yep, Somnambulant Saurians are notoriously undependable. Lately, they give so few effs they can only breathe ire.

  5. Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.

    I am a traditionalist and I am willing to accept differences but I am not willing to sit back and let others demand that I endorse whatever weird ideology they support. Common sense has been thrown out the door and it is time to clean the corners of the room so that we can return to a normal, civilized society.

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