The Left's Endless Commercial Has Weaponized Popular Culture
American consumers understand that most forms of popular culture have become nothing more than commercials for the Democrat party. Movies, television, and music focus less on entertainment than on influencing the next election. They have gone beyond mere leftist bias. Artists, writers, and musicians subordinate their craft in order to present one endless Democrat commercial.
This trend is equally egregious in the case of books. In modern bookstores, the Democrat commercial spreads far beyond the "politics" shelf. "The gardening books advocate hiring illegal aliens. The sports books reminisce about Vietnam."
A telling example of this trend appears in a 2018 book about the design of General Motors automobiles from the 1920s through the 1950s. Fins, by William Knoedelseder, appears to be credible, informative, and interesting until it reaches Chapter 9. In Chapter 9, the author apparently loses interest in classic cars and decides, instead, to tell the reader that President Trump is just like Hitler. He does not actually mention Trump. He does not discuss Trump's policies. He does not present actual evidence. The author simply discusses the pre-war automobile industry in Germany in terms of Hitler's plan to "make Germany great again." He even titles the chapter "Helping Make Germany Great Again." A seemingly interesting historic work was thus converted into yet another Democrat campaign commercial.
The use of classic cars as a cover for yet another comparison of Trump and Hitler is far from an isolated incident. The implications of this trend are far reaching. Those who want to pursue their favorite topic in books will find their way blocked. It is not simply a matter of having to endure a chapter or two that compares Trump to Hitler in the middle of an otherwise informative book. Like the thirteenth chime of a clock, these insertions cast doubt on everything that appears in such a book. Every allegedly nonfiction book presents facts that the reader cannot ordinarily verify on his own. There are hundreds of footnotes that the reader will never examine. Even if a reader does follow through on a footnote, he will often find that the author has imposed his own interpretations, biases, and extrapolations on every source upon which the author relies. Inserting a Trump-Hitler comparison into the middle of a book on classic car design is obviously absurd, but that absurdity carries far beyond the actual chapter in which it appears. A writer who uses Trump's campaign slogan to describe Hitler's murderous regime is not likely to be careful about other factual assertions. And do not think that these insults are aimed only at Trump. They are aimed at the millions of Americans that voted for him, wear the MAGA hats, and remain loyal to him as he endures many attacks.
That publishers, writers, and booksellers would jeopardize their own market in this way also speaks volumes about that industry. Misuse of the Nazi era for political purposes does a disservice to serious research and scholarship. Going out of one's way to dismiss the president and his 60 million–plus voters as Nazis did not advance the theme of the book, did not inform the readers, and most likely did not improve sales (unless the goal was to curry favor with like-minded reviewers). We must abandon the idea that authors and publishers are motivated primarily by those things. We are witnessing a large-scale suicide mission. The writers sacrifice their own credibility and that of their books in order to explode an IED in the reader's face. The left would rather that we not read at all than read books without Democrat commercials.
A population that does not read books is susceptible to leftist manipulation from television, movies, and music. Without the anchor that books provide, voters are cast adrift. They are more likely to vote based on whoever is ahead in "the polls" or whether the "stock market" is "up" or "down" this week.
The effect goes deeper than simple manipulation for the next election. True political debate depends on the ability of the debating parties to find some area of common ground, no matter how small. Only if there is some shared value can there be something for opposing parties to discuss. Otherwise, we merely flail at each other. But when one side completely abandons reason and seeks every opportunity to use the "Hitler" label against its opponents, it sends a clear message. That message denies the possibility of common ground. Those who send out that message will not listen to reason, and they are proud of it. When they drag out the "Hitler" attack even in a discussion of automobile design, they have used the nuclear option even in our most innocuous hobbies and leisure interests. They will ruin even the little things in life for us. They make it clear that they will leave us with no peace, no rest, no sanctuary. They have long argued that even the personal is political, and now they leave us with nothing purely personal in our lives. Our most personal interests are fair game for the vilest of political tactics.
The enduring symbol of our age may be the drag queen story hour in our local library. Men dressed as women teach five-year-olds how to twerk in the shadow of bookshelves on which modern books spew Nazi accusations against the parents.
We can fight back for a while. But in the end, there is nothing to do but confess our Nazism, surrender our children to the new gender fluidity, abandon our hobbies, and resign ourselves to the bland conformity of the totalitarian state. Reconstituted man will live neither as man nor woman, empty of all interests, desires, beliefs, and purpose except for service to the state. His only fear will be the outing of the hidden Nazi within. Every day —in every activity, every hobby, every book, every song, every movie — we will face our own Nuremburg trial with our "entertainers" as our prosecutors.
The totalitarian state is, ultimately, backed by force. But if Nazi accusations hang over our heads with every activity, we will censor and restrict ourselves. The Soviet Union reached the point where citizens would black out certain pictures and words in the books in their own homes, depending on Stalin's policies of the moment. We do not do this yet, but the totalitarian utopia of the future might demand no less of us. The fear of our own latent Nazism will keep us from reading, learning, and questioning. That the personal is now the political ensures that your new reading limitations will go far beyond politics.
Dictatorships and absolute monarchs have existed since the beginning of recorded history. But it remained for the totalitarians of our time to make such dictatorship so complete. We now see total war, in which the leftists use every discipline at their disposal (music, literature, art, drama, entertainment, "scholarship," psychology) as a weapon to control and manipulate mankind. They will use every modern form of mass communication, including innocuous-sounding books, as the means of delivering those weapons.