Redefining Normal

… the notion of American greatness, … Western civilization as a culture and how it is that, and not economic gains solely, that have defined the world’s greatest nation, the singular culture that was — because it isn’t anymore; this is the thing — the singular culture that was America. When immigrants came to this country, they were fleeing a lot of things.

They were fleeing what every immigrant flees: bondage, tyranny, repression, poverty, and all those other things associated. What they wanted to become was Americans. Part and parcel of that was freedom, of course, economic liberty. They wanted to become Americans. They did not want to come to America and turn America into the nation they left. Because what was happening in America was unique. There was no other place in the world like it, and they wanted to be part of it, and they lined up and they came in droves.

They tried to get here in all manner of ways, mostly legal. Not all of them were granted entry, and not all of them ended up becoming citizens. But to this day that influx and that desire remains. What has changed is the dissolution, the weakening of the distinct American culture that was the magnet for so many immigrants in the past. That distinct American culture has been under assault. I really trace it back. You know, it’s been under assault since the founding. I mean, there have been people that oppose the founding of this country back in the founding days.

But I really do think that the focus of the anti-Americanism that we are dealing with today gave birth or was birthed in the sixties. Now, I know we had communists throughout the twentieth century, and we had (sigh) communist infiltration of our institutions, like universities and schools and entertainment. But the sixties is where it coalesced. It’s where it codified and became an official movement which captured generations of people, not just a few stragglers here and there that would then someday be investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

So it’s really from the sixties onward that this current onslaught against this highly developed American culture has been waged. And it’s been successful. And I’ve always claimed from the early days of this program that at its roots — you know, aside from the overthrow of the concept of America, aside from the socialist or communist desires and the ideology behind the protest movement of the sixties. The cultural aspect contained a fervent need and desire, and that was to redefine what was normal — and I’ve been making this claim since this program began.

When people would call here and ask me to explain this particular movement in the left or that, I would say, “What you’re seeing is a bunch of people seeking to have normalcy or normality redefined so that it includes them.” It was a very strategic movement because it portrayed the American cultural as racist, as bigoted, as homophobic, as discriminatory, and all of this was practiced and studied. This was a calculated assault on American culture by taking what was the vast majority of the thinking and the philosophy and the belief system of our culture and assaulting it.

This is where this entire notion of inclusiveness and diversity was actually born, was back in the sixties. And it has grown and metastasized, and it sprouted off into other forms and other movements so that there are now redundancies. This idea that the United States was not diverse is absurd. The idea that American greatness is found in its diversity is literally absurd. It is intellectually absurd. It has nothing to do with America’s greatness. Inclusion, diversity have literally nothing to do with it. And yet you go talk to your average Millennial today, you’ll find that those are buzzwords. “Inclusiveness.”

We must have “inclusiveness,” and all these other buzzword terms that are bandied about. “Diversity.” They are the hallmarks. “Sustainability.” They are the hallmarks, and all of these thoughts, these philosophies are actually aimed at destroying what was the most inclusive country on the face of the earth, what was the most open and free country on the face of the earth. But intensely since the sixties, the entire notion of the United States of America has been under fevered assault. Well, I was glad to see today when I was doing my show prep… I ran into this column by Roger Kimball at PJ Media in which he echoes the idea that one of the things happening today to tear down this country is this quest to redefine what he calls “normality.”

I call it normalcy. But here’s what he says about it. “But whatever happened to normality? The Left has been on a campaign to ruin normality since the 1960s. Their dearest wish was to destroy and hollow out and ridicule the bourgeois virtues of good manners and decorum — even to utter those words sounds odd –” and today sound odd. Good manners is laughed at and made fun of. Decorum? That’s for nerds and the old fashioned. That’s for old fogies. Even to utter the words good manners and decorum sounds odd.

“– so successful has their battle against the language of traditional manners and morals been.” That’s a fundamental aspect of this too. When you are trying to redefine normalcy so that it includes you — who are these people? Anybody that didn’t like to be judged, therefore they didn’t like to be subject to laws. They didn’t like to be subjected to religious beliefs. They didn’t like to be subjected to morality, because all of those areas contained — there must be judgments. And they didn’t want to be judged.

They didn’t want to be found wanting. They didn’t want to be found odd. They didn’t want to be found abnormal. And so they began to portray the virtues of decorum and manners and morals and religion as discriminatory, as bigoted, as exclusionary. And they began to attack the very glue that held together this distinct American culture with the idea of blowing it up.

“Progressives long ago declared war on the normal,” which, again, I have been pointing out since the late eighties. Now progressives “are upset because someone they dislike –” Donald Trump “– has appeared wielding real power in ways they find abnormal?” And this is the great irony. They think Trump is now exactly what we thought of them: oddballs, vulgar, crass, unappreciative, insincere, arrogant, bombastic, all these things that we thought of them and they loved it, now that’s what they think of Trump.

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