The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, Welcome, welcome. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together as always. Thank you for tuning in. Please do your best to visit the key sites and follow track around to them. Ed Martin, excuse me. Proamericareport.com proamericareport.com. @ eagle Ed Martin. That’s what I started to say @EagleEdMartin on X. Ed Martin Live on Facebook and especially visit phyllisschlafly.com and sign up for the daily e-mail the the the the Daily WYNK again proamericareport.com check it out.
We have a lot to cover today and one of the things one of the major things that is happening of course is heading into the weekend next week is. Super Tuesday, when President Trump and others, I guess Joe Biden has a bunch of primaries too, but that should be it for any debate. I mean, it’s not really a debate now, but that’s coming up next week in a lot of states, 14 or 15 states. OK, little different subject.
I was thinking about talking about lawfare. Donald Trump on Friday was in court in federal court in Florida over the records retention case, dragging everyone into court again and again and again. And there’s lots of news there and I don’t know. It just doesn’t. It doesn’t interest me enough. I’m kind of tired of it and I wanna try to talk about a different subject with you, you know.
With my uh listeners, I have spoken about topics and and concepts and I get a lot of help from you all by your response. For example, the narrative machine. I call it the narrative machine, is how big government, big tech and big media decide on a message and they work it up and and they just pound the message into us, and a lot of the country believes what they’re told. I had one of my listeners who told me what about big business and I thought, yeah, maybe gotta add them. And I like to say big tech, big media, big government, but big business joins in, too right, they really do a lot of times. It’s a big corporations or it’s pharma that influences the narrative machine. So it’s the bigs, it’s the bigs. Andrew Breitbart did know something back when he was naming his websites big government, Big Hollywood, all this kind of stuff.
So but it gets me back to Andrew Breitbart. I believe Andrew Breitbart is often. Often credited with saying the following phrase, I I’m not sure it’s original to him, but he kind of popularized it in the last 20 years. He would say a culture is upstream from politics. Culture is upstream from politics. Now I want to concede the truth of that statement. Insofar as America, just stick to America, I don’t know the rest of the world. I don’t think it can apply everywhere, but just for America. Culture is upstream from politics, seems based on my reading of history, even though I don’t trust what I read, fake history seems common to me, but in general, what I would say is it looks like it was true. In 1776. Culture was upstream from politics. The culture was very Christian. It was very independent minded and people decided that they were going to construct their politics based on the culture. You know, it’s the old thing, the the Franklin and others, John Adams were attributed with talking about. The the founding and the Constitution and saying, you know, it’s for a virtuous people. The system is set up for virtuous people. The culture has has fostered in this grouping of people a desire for independence, sure, but also a system of government that diffuses power, that that is just distrustful of centralizing too much, et cetera, et cetera. That was the culture. In you know,
Culture was upstream from politics. You can see the same thing through the 1800s. You can see it at various times. I think you can still hang, hang with it. I’m. I’m OK with hanging with it. I can even think that you know the kind of culture the the Protestant work ethic, the, the, the Horatio Alger up from your bootstraps and the GI Bill after World War 2. This sort of anyone can pull themselves up that feels like the culture informed the politics, meaning the culture was everyone wants to do it. They want a chance. And so the politics was responsive to that.
However, I believe that the great shift happened around the time of the Great Society. The Lyndon Johnson expansion of government into the social network, into the social welfare business dramatically, and I think that’s when the shift happened. And so by the time you get to the year 2000. Let’s say, and certainly by today, but let’s say 20, let’s say 25 years ago at the end of the Clinton era, government has grown. And and it’s it’s it’s grown so centralized and so powerful that it is now telling the the culture what it will be.
So the politics will be Roe v. Wade, Doe V Bolton in 1973. That makes up out of whole cloth an idea of how how abortion could be a right makes it up and the culture is following behind it. People are pro-choice, so-called they’re pro abortion, but they’re they’re that. That’s the culture of America following behind. After the big after the big the Great Society and this, this explosion in welfare and this explosion in government centralization, the administrative state is exploding. The judicial activism is exploding. Remember, in 1967 or 8, we get no fault divorce and now the the role of government in defining the family is exploding. We have a a family courts that are deciding who gets custody. We have family court, divorce courts deciding how to structure divorce and alimony and palimony and everything else. We have more and more of a role of government in housing because of loans. More and more of a role of government in in terms of universities, again because of the loan system. And so by the time you get to let’s say, let’s call it 2010, maybe two years into Obama, we’ve seen the, the, the healthcare, Obamacare. Has happened and we have the the the bailouts that happened. We’re we’re in the middle still of the wars that are just costing a fortune and causing again taking out of the in order to pursue all this a big one in order to pursue the the World Trade it was George W Bush that let China in. Into the World Trade Organization and allowed them to stay in as a developing nation or whatever that was. And so all of a sudden by then, you’ve got China taking away our jobs. It’s the politics that are taking away the culture of the heartfelt, the heartland and the Rust Belt. So that you get all the way down to today and when so my, the difference maker is in 1776 and on through probably till you know the the late late late in last century you had a government that was small enough in the sense that it wasn’t intrusive enough that people could culture could drive it.
By the way, drop a quick footnote here. More and more, it looks like it seems likely that the CIA and others and the government intelligence was running Hollywood, telling Hollywood what propaganda to put out and and do. Do you think they limited themselves just to propaganda against the Soviets? Did they really not want propaganda against the Americans? Maybe to make them patriotic. Rah rah rah fight a war. But certainly for example, in the in the post 911 era Rah Rah RAH fight a couple of wars and we were fed that propaganda and all for different fronts. So so here’s what I’m saying.
At this point in history, and this may be, this may be an ending to the Republic. It may be a a sign of the demise of Republic. I’m not defending it. I’m describing it. At this point you say to yourself, politics is upstream of culture. Politics is upstream of culture, because what the politics has decided on family life. On healthcare, on education, on world affairs, on military, politics has decide decided how those will operate in our community. The politics is driving what the agenda is. The border is wide open because the federal government is allowing it and the culture is becoming more and more anti immigrant and and threatened by this.
It’s not ideal. It’s not ideal to say. Let’s say you run your household and you decide to let strangers wander into your house, your kids and your adult children, and your wife. Or in my case, my wife are not gonna be comfortable with that. It’s gonna make them uneasy. And after a while, it’s gonna make it less and less acceptable to have any meaningful immigration. So we’re in a position where politics, the politics, is so upstream from culture and you don’t have to go far again. It’s not the it’s not the culture that stopped praying. It it’s the the laws that said you can’t pray in school and we’re going to abide by some dramatic separation of church and state, et cetera, et cetera. And you can say, well, they should have stood up and fought, OK, maybe maybe, but if you look at how it played out the politics, meaning the government. Was so upstream from from culture with such strength that, didn’t have a chance.
I mean, a culture still exists right now. The the culture in America is less and less recognizable from what we had preferred, what we were thinking we would be and what we were for a long time. Whether you, however, it’s shifted, this isn’t about rock’n’roll music, or even it’s not just about apps on your phone.
It’s about who’s driving the culture. And the driver of the culture is politics. It’s upstream. And if you don’t see that, it’s just if you don’t see it, it’s a cop out to be honest.
And so when people say, oh, I, I’m not gonna be in politics, I’m gonna go be a writer. I’m gonna persuade society. Nonsense. You’re not persuading anything.
Because if it’s not acceptable in the society, you’re not going to be popular. You’re gonna. You might persuade 10 people. But the politics is going to swamp you out. If you want to be a university professor, there’ll be a few islands left, Hillsdale, Steubenville Ave Maria. You know, a couple of places that are conservative, otherwise get you get swamped out.
Politics is upstream. From culture and you could feel that.
All right. That’s what you need to know. We’ve got to take a break. We’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report back in a moment.
