A Reminder That There Is No Rightward Cultural Shift
A right-wing concert organizer in Kentucky found this out the hard way
The prevailing thought in mainstream political and media circles in the weeks and months after an insurrectionist presidential candidate won the White House in 2024 was that the country – the whole country, every part of the country – had shifted hard to the right both politically and culturally.
I guess the former might be correct about a few groups who had to touch the goddamn stove in 2024 just to feel alive and maybe because Joe Rogan told them to do it, or maybe they just could not pull the lever for a lady. The latter was always dead wrong though.
A whole lot of rich guys and bot farms and fascist propagandists back in 2024 and 2025 wanted you to believe the backlash to Woke 1.0 – our long-awaited racial justice reckoning – had arrived in all its glory. Everyone on your TV was wearing cowboys hats and cowboy boots. All those COVID-era TV ads with Black women and people of various sizes and shapes and sexualities were gone; in their place were strong-jawed white guys and glassy-eyed Barbies.
Denny Carter
I thought of this phenomenon today when I came across a link in the Bad Faith Times discord channel – a retirement home for elder millennials – about some sort of Kid Rock concert being canceled due to a near-total lack of interest. The fella who organized the event had bought the narrative that all 350 million Americans were dying to indulge in vacuous right-wing cultural events. He believed it so unquestioningly that he spent a bunch of money that he'll never get back. That's a tough break. You hate to see it.
The event was called Freedom Fest, a pro-Trump get together in Kentucky. My first thought was that maybe it's not good business to put on a concert for a president with the lowest ratings in living memory. I'm no businessman though; only a humble blogger giving his kid bad fantasy football advice.
It's not that Trump's cultural acceptance was the same in 2025 as it had been in 2017 when he first stumbled into the White House. There was a brief moment in which the public seemingly accepted our first tyrant as a national savior of sorts, as an inextricable and permanent part of the national fabric. I wrote about it in November 2024, eleven days after he had somehow won.
Today we see fascist thought drifting everywhere, infecting (almost) everyone, becoming normal for an entire generation of young people who have no memory of pre-fascist America. Today it is different. Billionaire owners of major media outlets are happily bending the knee to our new fascist leader. Formerly oppositional cable news hosts are begging to kiss the ring and gain access as Trump tries to remake the United States in his monstrous image. Pro athletes are dancing like the fascist leader in moments of on-field glory, and even bowing to him before rabid throngs as they celebrate their wins. The largest social media platform on earth – owned by the richest man on earth – is now wholly dedicated to promoting our fascist leader as the savior of the United States and will push his radical, anti-democracy agenda to millions of people who will ingest propaganda without ever once questioning it. I’m old enough to remember that this was not the case in 2016. ... Young men now see Trump as their last, best chance to undo the gains made by women that have threatened men’s place in the hierarchy of domination, to bring the promised violence and retribution of Gamergate to federal policymaking. That was not so eight years ago. When young men go fash, democracies have a problem that can’t be easily solved.
As part of a larger narrative, a cultural swing to the right would help us make sense of an election in which a deeply-flawed and widely-hated presidential candidate – a guy who had been booted from the office four years earlier – cruised to victory. How else could one explain this besides positing that Americans – especially white folks who may have held their nose and voted Biden in 2020 – had simply had enough of "woke" culture and were ready for all the rancid traditionalism Trump promised. Maybe that, combined with voters' eternal search for a president who can make things a little cheaper, could explain how the slippery insurrectionist leader could slither his way back into power.
Denny Carter
People were asked to use proper pronouns for a couple years and they said: You've left me no choice but to plunge the country into a fascistic nightmare.
As you may or may not know, I've done a lot of blogging about this weird little trick played on the American public over the past couple years, this psyop meant to convince you and me that the US had rejected "woke" – it hasn't – and made a permanent cultural lurch to the right. I've written (and thought) so much about this because I think it's important to point out the deception and to tell folks they have not lost their minds: There has been no cultural shift.
-In March I wrote for Liberal Currents about the vast and coordinated fakery of conservative cultural events, including the pathetic right-wing Super Bowl halftime show with the aforementioned Kid Rock. No one watched it; you wouldn't know it by coverage of the show.
-Back in February I wrote for the Courier newsletter about Super Bowl ads designed to reflect our (made-up) cultural embrace of a right-wing aesthetic. Mostly I blame Billy Bob Thornton.
-Way back in September 2025 I got mad about Ram Truck TV ads and blogged about the ludicrous propaganda meant to convince you that Americans had finally come around to embracing Trump as daddy. It's all bullshit, of course. That never matters though.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
