The Culture War is Unwinnable (On Current Terms)

Bringing Down The House on Discourse & This Version of the Newsletter...

Let’s just say I’m something of a new man at the moment.

Part of this transformation has been noted in the previous two articles on this newsletter of mine. Part of it has been transpiring offline, or away from social media at least. I’ve got new projects on the horizon—some for fun and some paid—and I’ve got my old stable of favorites to tend to. I also have some complete revitalizations I’m undertaking on others. This newsletter will no longer be called “Universe of the Astounding” and will no longer be this half-baked dumping ground of articles and stories. In fact, it will be a complete pivot away from it all. I won’t be deleting any previous items, but they’re going to be cordoned off in their own archival section.

Part of this reason is something I’ve been ranting about for months now, be it at walls or any friend willing to lend an ear, and it boils down to the following:

Just replace “Earth” with “discourse.” Not just any old act of written or spoken communication or debate, as per dictionary definition, but “THE DISCOURSE.” Specifically discourse that pertains to the ever-magical concept of “The Culture War.”

What started some 10-plus current years ago because of the (then) latest improprieties in the comical world of gaming journalism, fanned by a litany of divisive Hollywood pap and the birth of a subsequent cottage industry bitching about it, amplified ten-fold by trapping everyone and their mothers inside their home with their electronic hell-mouth of choice for the better part of two years. The monoculture dissolves through the shattering of shared values and the perpetual atomization of internet, and we find ourselves in our current cultural moment. Over half the United States has thrown out the old administration in favor of a return to their prior break from the norm, and popular culture is a shattered landscape. Or rather, there is still a monoculture, but the radicalization of the political American has drawn them far away from that common denominator, however low it is deemed.

And all you fucking people can do is bitch about the same goddamn things you’ve been talking about for that very decade. Still on it about Disney Star Wars, still crying about shit you had to read in high school, still debating people about Starship Troopers with all the good faith of a Sonderzüge driver bound for Dachau. I’m not expecting the world to have changed on a dime because we just threw out the last half-decade’s status quo, and I certainly have no illusions about the rate of progress in fine art and popular entertainment. Because here’s the bitter truth.

No one cares.

Not in any meaningful way. Most people just want the diversion. Most are happy to idle for 90 minutes on a TikTok or Facebook reels, clock their dopamine, and call it entertainment. For the marginally more sophisticated animal among the normie population (of which there are objectively more of them then there are of you), you still have hundreds of thousands who will just play their AAA games, who will go to the latest big-name blockbuster (even as the numbers dwindle), and who will listen to whatever’s topping the charts because more people still listen to radio than any other audio format, even the much-cherished and attacked podcasting business.

They do not care what the neckbeard screaming about the M-She-U thinks. They do not care that “modern music is autotuned garbage,” an opinion based on the fact that “Believe” by Cher and the party pop craze of the ‘08 Recession exist. You are not winning hearts and minds crying about CIA funny-money in mid-century postmodern art, you are not a 4D chess wizard for bitching about The Great Gatsby.

For they simply do not care.

There is no one left to enter the gateway.

That leaves us with a self-congratulatory cottage industry of people complaining about problems they already know, with solutions they’ve already proposed, arguing in bad faith with people who attack them in bad faith.

I have been feeling sick to my stomach because this is what I have surrounded myself with for the better part of a year. I am not interested in naming names because that is pointless. If everyone in my immediate vicinity is doing it, and I’m the lone freak of nature that would actually like to find something more in life, then I suppose I’ll saunter off and sort myself out. And I’ve been doing just that, starting with a surreal ritual to take me right back to my roots: a movie marathon.

The Greatest 24 Hours of 2025 Thus Far. Courtesy of Letterboxd.

I have come to the terrible conclusion that good things have been made over the past 25 years and some of them are actually quite well-known too. This past Sunday was the day I decided to pop a couple of my cinephile cherries that had gone untouched.

My first David Fincher film about the ever-(in)famous Facebook, a beautifully performed film that reeks of the 2000s. Check.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, a foundation piece of both synthwave culture and the Ryan Gosling Industrial Complex. Double check.

On the list went, including one of the finest films I’ve ever seen in my life: Deep Cover. Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum in a Bill Duke joint that’ll blow the back of your head off. Neon noir brilliance to the Nth degree.

I even managed to watch The Matrix and Dark City back-to-back, and came to another terrifying conclusion: both are awesome. None of this contrarian horseshit about latter besting the former. Both are damn good blockbusters with their own phenomenal sense of style, action, and atmosphere. I capped it off with my fifth (or was it sixth?) viewing of Blade Runner, where the sublime subtleties of the film sock you in the jaw, tied together the whole affair. A cleansing ritual that started high noon on Sunday, and right to high noon on Monday.

You know what gives me joy?

It’s not watching people throwing their inadequate tastes at one another on Xitter, scoring their paltry little wins for their side in the rat maze of modern social media.

It’s watching artists at the absolute apex of their powers. It’s watching that incredible film, listening to that incredible song, reading that incredible story. If I can bring that revelatory experience to an audience, whether as creator or curator, I will die the happiest man to have ever lived on this godforsaken third rock from the Sun.

You know how I’m NOT going to get there?

By persisting in this delusional, petty, low-rent rat-race to the bottom of the algorithmic barrel. I’m not going to get there by hot takes, news updates, or playing the trend game. I’m not going to get there by being a smarmy cunt screaming about films I don’t care about or bitching about music I don’t listen to.

When I say “The Culture War is Unwinnable,” this is what I mean. I mean that if we are simply here to whine and cry about shit we all already know to people who already get it, while “ze enemy” (in GIGANTIC air-quotes) has nowhere left to go culturally or creatively, then how does one WIN? Wars are meant to be WON. They are not meant to peter out into abstract stalemates like the one we are presently in. The fact of the matter is that technology has outpaced even politics as being an arch-culprit in the destruction of monoculture.

We have access to everything. Normies can watch/read/listen to WHATEVER they damn-well please. They aren’t going to come for your book or your comic or your film or your album because it is now competing not just with how much people want to protest “the left,” but how much effort they want to put into something NEW. They do not want to put a sliver of effort into that in a culture that has blessed them with the amount of convenience born from streaming. What they need are curators. They need those who can actually point them in the way of good, nourishing art.

The problem: the way “the right” has set their table, they couldn’t curate a fucking carpet color, let alone play tastemaker. Moreover, by focusing so hard on the political nonsense, they are simply alienating themselves from a public that are SICK TO DEATH of hyper-politicization. When people say they hate how everything is political, THAT MEANS YOU ASSHOLE! It ain’t just “the left,” Sweet Cheeks, it’s the whole fucking game. My answer to that is the same as it was by the end of cult favorite from ‘83, WarGames: “The only way to win is to not play.”

The Culture War is unwinnable because the problem is beyond politics. It is the fact that we have access to everything and have left curation in the hands of people whose only interests are keeping you slavishly glued to the system at all costs. These tools can be used to curate and enrich people’s engagement with the arts and entertainment, but the right is so fucking narrow-minded, they keep missing the forest for the trees, and forsake growth in the name of “ourguying” themselves out of civilization. And frankly, if the decision came down to “be an artist in a political space” or “be an artist beyond a political space,” I’m going BEYOND. Bed and Bath included. Because this is an evolutionary dead end for the arts. Nothing is getting done, no one thinks more than five feet ahead of themselves.

You got to reach people where they are, and while yes, many are still in their soma-induced pleasure-stupor surrounding mainstream entertainment, no one cares if it’s “woke” anymore. Are more people tuning out? Yes. The superhero craze is on its last legs, and whether the latest iteration of Superman soars or self-destructs, it’ll be what brings the house down. But that then begs the question of “where are they going?” And frankly—with no disrespect to the medium—anime and manga are not good answers.

It’s an industry riddled with workforce problems, a house of cards that can get brought down by one good act of meaningful reform, and a packed, decades-long back-catalogue that’ll snuff out interest in ANY Western media, indie or mainstream. Furthermore, Japan is not the West. There is osmosis for sure, but there are objectively different sensibilities at play, and in an age where people are getting more and more protectionist about American interests, outsourcing your entertainment is a dumb move. I say this as a man who does enjoy the fruits of that industry’s labor, but I like it to have some actual home-field competition.

How do we get there? How about, instead of trying to sell people on politicized art in an age where people are sick to fucking death of politics, we sell them on cool shit and remind them WHY it’s cool? We work backwards towards the unique meanings of art and entertainment instead of flailing your limbs wildly, pissing your pants about bananas on walls and hate-jizzing into them about the latest idpol identity swap in [INSERT MEDIA HERE]. How about, in an age where no one knows what the fuck they want to watch or listen to—or frankly HOW to watch and listen when most use media to silence their inner dialogue—we point people in the direction of the good kush as I often call it? The great fun stuff worth their time and attention

If it sounds like this impossible given the current climate in conservative media, that’s because it is. And that’s why I’m taking my things and going home. That’s why this newsletter is getting a five-alarm makeover and is becoming part of a much larger rebrand and relaunch.

I’m done justifying my tastes. I’m done pretending like arguing on the internet means anything anymore. I hate this. I hate the entire godforsaken system, and if it was a tangible entity, I would firebomb it into the ground. I would hack a drone, and strike it down like a terror cell in the Middle East. I would raze the machinery, and tear the building down brick-by-brick with a sledgehammer and my bare hands. I always keep saying that I’m glad I never became a pundit, but this is the moment where I officially cut that shit off. I have nothing left to say on the whole “RW art” discourse. Nothing. There are good things being made out in the world, and I frankly don’t give a shit if they’re made by card-carrying communist or a maniac 3rd positioner. If Curtis Yarvin broke into my house, dropped a Great American Novel on my lap with his name on it, I would sing the praises of that book as a book if it spoke to me.

I like jazz, love it in fact. I like certain Rothkos and Pollocks. I like Charles Ives. I am down to read Joyce or Fitzgerald. The ending of “The Dead” from Dubliners is objectively one of the finest pieces of writing in the English language. What I don’t like is listening to a bunch of (ironically enough) sound and digital fury crapping on these things because we’re supposed to because some conspiracy from before I was born made these forms of art and artist null and void.

That’s bullshit and you can fuck yourself kindly for thinking so. None of this is up for debate, because that’s not why I’m writing this. There is no getting me back on-side, there’s no “telling it how it is.” These are my opinions, and I’m done justifying them to the world. What matters is that I like them, and I like them just as much as I enjoy reading The Shadow pulps or my Marvel Conan comics or watching the Godzilla films. I will sing the praises of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring just as I would any of the great Beethoven symphonies. I will share my love of Miles Davis and his electric era in the same breath as I would the works of the impressionists like Ravel, Satie, and Debussy.

Because the insecurity is gone. I am a dangerous animal to be having in any creative space right now because I am young, hungry, passionate, and without shame. That doesn’t mean I’ll write a million theme and variations on 4’33” to “PWN DA RIGHT,” nor does it mean I’m going to make my SUPERBASEDMAN comic series where we all scream about The Gays™ for 20 pages a shot. It means something much more deadly:

I will make what I like, and I will share it with whomever enjoys it. Whatever I enjoy, I will share gladly with those willing to try. I’m keeping everything from this iteration of the newsletter available as my lone act of “filtering.” If you can stomach the remains of this 20-something’s bloviating, fantastic! If not, sorry to see you go, but go with God regardless.

There is no future in this iteration of the Culture War. The one who wins this is the one who manages to crack the code on curating. The one who understands that the key is in finding the commonalities, promote them, and pivot. The key is in finding and celebrating what resonates, ideology be damned, and pointing people in its direction. I plan to play that role of curator because I’m better than every sorry soul I’ve seen try. You’re all scrubs. You’re about to be outdone by a 23-year-old running on the piss and vinegar of a college experience dashed by COVID and a burning desire to break out of this pathetic infrastructure built to enrich some talking heads and foster fistfights on the bow of the Titanic.

The next time I post on here will be different. This entire newsletter is about to change. Buckle up.

Instead of the usual call-to-action, check out the video down below for one of the other keys to this transformation of mine. It was quite the epiphany for me.