Delingpole: The Entire Cultural Establishment Has Surrendered to the Radical Left

Cultural
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James Delingpole

Here — keep a sick bag handy as you watch — are some Hollywood celebrities putting their special actor voices on to tell us how ashamed they are of being white.

Do you ever want to see another movie involving any of these grovelling slimeballs ever again?

Here is a white British comic called Leigh Francis tearfully apologising for having once impersonated black characters for comedic effect in an old TV show called Bo’ Selecta:

Francis has since developed a successful TV career as a crazy character called Keith Lemon, who just doesn’t give a fook about anything — he swears, he’s wild, he’s fearless, he’s completely unpredictable and oh-so-wacky…

But how is Francis going to maintain that particular comedy persona now that we know that underneath he is a cowardly, politically correct, blubbing cry-baby who in fact really does care what a bunch of race-baiting, commie thugs think, and is so scared of losing his very well-paid job on mainstream TV that he’s prepared to grovel and humiliate himself in order to keep it?

Here is one of the BBC’s best-paid stars Gary Lineker — he gets £1.75 million a year for commenting on football — showing how very much down he is with the whole Black Lives Matter thing:

We could go on and on like this — listing all the movie stars and TV presenters and bestselling authors and radio show hosts and journalists and editors and pop stars and other celebrities who’ve spent the last few days kowtowing to the Red Guard of Black Lives Matter.

But it would be depressing and quite unnecessary because — barring the odd exception such as Ricky Gervais — the list would have to include pretty much everyone in the mainstream entertainment industry.

They’ve all surrendered to the radical left because a) in many cases they share its politics anyway, and b) if they didn’t do so their careers would now be toast.

You only have to consider what happened to Nigel Farage at London’s LBC radio. Here was a presenter whom the radio station had expressly recruited because they wanted someone outspoken, politically incorrect, and on the right.

And what did LBC sack him for? Essentially for being outspoken, politically incorrect, and on the right.

The speed with which all this has happened has been astonishing. Barely a month ago it would not have occurred to almost anyone that Gone With The Wind was desperately in need of being memory-holed: now it’s all but banned.

Ditto, Little Britain — probably the most wildly successful British comedy series of the Noughties, which made household names of its stars David Walliams and Matt Lucas, with catchphrases — “computer says no”, “the only gay in the village”, “No but, yeah but, no” — that almost everyone in the country could quote.

Now, it has been airbrushed from history. Fifteen years ago it was ubiquitous to the point of total cultural dominance. Today, purged from the libraries of both Netflix and the BBC, it might almost never have existed.

But were we, the general viewing public, ever consulted on any of this?

Of course not. This is a consequence not of popular demand but of cultural entryism and cowardice.

It has been going on for years, just like the Marxist Antonio Gramsci wanted when he called for a “Long March Through the Institutions”: little by little Hollywood, TV land, publishing, the media industry, music, sport — every branch of the entertainment industry, every aspect of popular culture has been suborned by left-wing activists who have infiltrated the system and corrupted it for their own political ends.

All of these industries used to have a degree of diversity of thought, some admittedly more than others. But now there is none in any of them: they all swing radical left, they all pay homage to the identity politics pieties of the Social Justice movement, they all brutally enforced conformity on #MeToo, and now they’re doing the same with Black Lives Matter. For some time now, no one has been able to reach senior levels in these industries without having all the politically correct views. The only difference now is that we have reached the point where even the talent are expected to be on board with the identity politics programme.

What this means is that the left has achieved near-total victory in the Culture Wars.

Some of us have been warning for years that this was coming. But more often than not we were dismissed as conspiracy theorists or alt-right cranks or just too obsessed with trivia of little relevance to the cultural mainstream.

I remember, a few years back, thinking what a rich seam of material I would be able to mine once mainstream newspapers like the Daily Mail started getting interested in the culture wars. All those lucrative articles one would be able to write, explaining the significance of GamerGate and ComicsGate — about how, sure, it might seem on the surface like these stories were niche and about odd, geeky people, but how in fact they were the bellwether for the Great Reckoning to come.

But the newspapers and magazines were never much interested — not even the conservative ones representing the people most likely to be appalled by and to suffer from what was happening to their culture.

What do we now?

I agree with a lot of the points made by John Nolte in his piece Your Handy-Dandy Survival Guide To Life Under Social Justice Mob Rule:

The fascist mob is going to declare certain toys, books, movies, and television shows “problematic,” and these corporations, that are either cowardly or infested with social justice warriors, are going to disappear these things. “Problematic” books, movies, and TV shows will vanish off proverbial store shelves — physical and digital.

Another possibility is that they will be mutilated by censors. “Problematic” scenes, moments, characters, and words will be removed.

This is no longer a right-wing, tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. It’s actually happening now.

We need to do the equivalent of that final scene in Platoon: now that Charlie has overrun our forward base, all we can do is retreat to our bunkers, call down our artillery on our own positions and hope there will be some of us left at the end of it.

Or rather, to put it less histrionically, we need to recognise that all the cultural institutions we took for granted as purveyors of our entertainment — from Hollywood to the BBC to NASCAR — are at the very least tainted, and at worst probably lost forever.

 

What do we instead? Probably what must of us are doing already.

For example, even though the BBC remains the dominant radio and TV broadcast in Britain, I almost never listen to it or watch it any more because it’s pure woke propaganda.

When I watch TV, it’s almost always foreign language shows with subtitles — eg the Israeli series Fauda – because they tend to be less prone to political correctness than English-language series.

When I get my news, it’s almost never from newspapers because even ones that used to be conservative (at least in theory) have now swung left. Instead, it’s either from unashamedly conservative online outlets like Breitbart or from selected bloggers.

When I want to listen to intelligent, informed commentators talking at length, I no longer do that on any of the TV channels. I do it on independent podcasts, where nobody owes any fealty to the PC values of the cultural mainstream.

The cultural mainstream is over. Sooner or later it is going to pay a terrible price for this — for alienating at least half its potential audience with its nauseating woke values, for wagging its finger at us instead of entertaining us.

But until the backlash comes, our main job as lovers of liberty and independent thought is to hit these cucked industries where it most hurts: by denying them our money. We can survive without them. Unless and until they can be made to realise that they can’t survive without us, then frankly I don’t give a damn if their entire edifice is burned to ashes.

James Delingpole is the host of the Delingpod podcast. You can support him at Patreon.

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