By Boyd Cathey
September 8, 2026
I think it evident to anyone that we are in the middle of a real "cultural war," that is, a vigorous, often vicious, mostly angry, take-no-prisoners struggle for what is left of the American country we received as a legacy from our ancestors. And by and large our side is losing. On almost every front we face nearly insuperable, multifaceted challenges and assaults-in education and our disastrous educational system, in our entertainment and leisure pursuits, in our families, in our politics, and in the very foundations of our religious faith and traditions. It is, very simply, impossible to avoid this war; wherever we go, whatever we do, we meet its advance guards, its forward panzer units. We cannot attend church, or go to a PTA meeting, or view nightly television news (or prime time TV programs) or a football game to root for our favorite team-we cannot take a vacation, drop into the local Target store, visit our physicians, or even entertain guests-without it intruding in some way into our lives.
Each morning as I get up early-usually around 6 a.m.-I switch on the local news and weather just enough to know what's going on. But, usually after fifteen or twenty minutes, my mind bogged down in and cluttered with the heavy dross of mounting barbarities and widespread insanity, I switch over to a Sirius music channel, usually to have some classical music in the background as I begin my day in earnest. Perhaps later in the day, I'll catch a classic old Western on Encore Westerns, or something on Youtube, if I have the time.
With all that most of us have to do there is only so much that most of us can absorb or that most of us have time for in our busy days, our normal days.
Most people, most of the friends I know, are "normal" people. By that I mean they have families and regular jobs, or have settled into retirement. They raise their children, go to church on Sundays (and sometimes during the week), dutifully pay bills and taxes, do necessary domestic work around the house, and generally have a certain rhythm and schedule in their lives. There is a certain consistency for most of us that conforms to "the way things are," that has us fit into regular cycles of life. In a sense, we are obeying the laws of nature as written on our hearts and inscribed in our minds, in our way of thinking. But we also reflect, in our best moments, the dictates of Divine Positive Law, which do not override the rhythm of Natural Law, but confirm it: We do not steal from our neighbors, we stay married (or at least try to) to the same person, we accept our parental responsibilities to raise our offspring, we do not kill our fellow human beings (save in personal defense or the hardships of war), we honor our parents, we believe we have a solemn obligation to respect and defend our country just as we respect and defend our families. These proscriptions are directly from the Decalogue, from God, but they also are written in nature, itself.
I would term this desired harmonious existence "normal," something that God-created human beings attempt to do and fulfill as a natural trajectory in their lives. And I would suggest that this is one of the major differences between "regular" folks and those people we see on the news, constantly, who
seem to do absolutely nothing else in life but gather (often paid by pass-through George Soros money and by others like him) from place to place via Volkswagen buses to one planned demonstration or rally to another.
It's like the unkempt and mostly unwashed demonstrators, with their unrested eyes glazed over with hysteria, I witnessed protesting a Trump rally way back in December 2015, and whom I saw again-I would swear the same ones-in 2024. And, I would bet, some of the same ones who attempted to harass and interrupt a state UDC convention a few years ago here in North Carolina. Some were apparently members of the local Communist Workers' World Party, but there are millions more like them, self-denominated "progressivists," not members of the WWP and certainly not professed Communists, who are scattered across the nation, congregated in university towns, in cities. Nevertheless, their views and actions in many ways mirror the essential radicalism of the WWP.
Many are what we call Millennials, aged between 19 and 39; but there are others as well-grandmothers who never got over the 1960s, leftist college professors and educators, environmental extremists who think the world will end in 2028 if we don't shut down oil and coal, Democrats who echo the latest progressivist slogans and causes, young couples who believe that marriage is passe' and a relic of a bygone and regressive age, and an assortment of clergymen and "clergy women."
Existence, life itself, for these people is bound up in the ongoing struggle, a constantly consuming effort to destroy all perceived "evil" on earth, as they see it, and bring forth what they call a state and social condition of "peace, brotherhood, equality, and justice." In other words, they zealously seek to create a "new man," a new man without the encrustations of the past and of history-a new man not possessed of the religious and social accoutrements endemic to and inherited from his, by definition, "oppressive" European legacy. Original sin and the recognition that mankind is fallible, and that he can only achieve the real fulfillment of his true humanity by acknowledging and living by the laws of Nature and of God, is implicitly, if not explicitly, swept away.
What they sloganize as "Equality," and the continuing quest for it, is central to this ideological praxis. And at the core of this conception of equality is race and the necessity to extirpate "racism" and erase anything reminding us of our "racist past." Closely joined to this racial equality is equality of the sexes and the necessity to destroy all barriers and differences that separate them, even to the point of denying the actuality or distinctiveness of sex, itself. Are we not all, thus, "gender fluid"?
These people are possessed of a vision that is distinctly at odds with that of the "normals." They seek to completely and radically overturn and transform our culture and the society in which we live, and, thus far, they have been hugely successful. They never seem to stop, never seem to take a breather; for them life itself is bound up in the never-ceasing struggle. It overrides everything else. Their youth wing is easily summoned out into the streets to march for this or that progressive cause. They show up en masse to talk at school board meetings; they gather to protest against a monument to Robert E. Lee or Christopher Columbus; they flood newspapers and online media with their short, intemperate letters; they are the first to make themselves available to very sympathetic newscasters whenever a controversial story breaks. They want us all to think they are a large majority of our citizens and the rest of us, we "deplorables," are a minority of angry far right boobs.
They are-these fellow citizens-numerous, in the millions, but because they consistently have the loudest voices or get the most news coverage, does not mean they are the overwhelming majority they claim to be. And they know it, and that is why they continue their frenzied and unbridled efforts with even more passion and fury.
I denominate them "latter-day Pod People."
Back in November 2016 the totally unexpected election triumph of Donald Trump tossed a temporary monkey wrench into their Operation Barbarossa plans. It was a shock, and like all consumed revolutionaries, it was a signal to step up their activities, their multifaceted attempts to stop a genuine MAGA agenda. Thus, we had Russiagate and the successive impeachment efforts.
But far more effective have been the efforts to seriously infiltrate and pervert any real populist, counter-revolutionary America First success.
Donald Trump essentially inherited a Republican Party and a "conservative movement" establishment ("ConInc." in Dr. Paul Gottfried's memorable phrase) that in many ways is dependent on Deep State managers and funding. The GOP lives out a template that is conditioned by the largesse and favors from a military industrial and international complex, in particular, the deep-pocket financial support from zealous large corporate donors and pro-zionists, whose political Israeli-First fanaticism, in effect, compromises the legitimate, pro-Americanism of most Americans of the Jewish faith.
By now it seems apparent, in the Donald's second term, that the once high hopes for a real counter-revolution have been dashed. That is not to say that every reform effort has failed; indeed, there are domestic policy initiatives which should be lauded. And it would be unjust not to notice them. Yet, it is in foreign policy where the vaunted America First agenda has most visibly come apart.
It was said back in 2016 that Donald Trump's essential unfamiliarity with the intricacies of cut-throat, high-stakes American politics was an advantage-he was not influenced, we were told, by the usual attachments that so prejudiced that vast majority of our political leadership. Yet, that very supposed advantage meant also, we now know, that there was a wide gap, a lacuna, in Trumpworld to be filled by whomever succeeded in gaining the president's ear and confidence. And those who have been most successful have been the in-place neoconservative elites and the permanent managerial class.
Thus, in reality the powers-that-were continue as the powers-that-be.
In the present war (for that is what it is) for our country and for its future, the leadership of the Republican Party and most of the ConInc. Commentariat (e.g., Fox News) remain prisoners of the same ideological fixations and postulates which guide their supposed opposition over on the Left. Both the establishment Right and the Left operate from similar and overall analogous standards of what is "progress" and that "equality" is the proposition and idea on which our country is based.
ConInc. may claim loudly that it defines the concepts differently, but in the end the differences fade away as reality rears its ugly head. They have been intellectually castrated by an intellectual "long march" of gradual but continual accretions. Their vaunted opposition serves mainly to give the revolutionaries' latest conquests a veneer of respectability and the ability to pronounce their latest achievement to be actually "conservative," as in their quick acceptance of same sex marriage as "conservative" or their earlier embrace of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and 1970s. And soon, why not their eventual acquiescence in transgenderism?
In the culture war, the "loyal opposition" have de facto gone over to the other side. They are part of the "swamp."
It is time for the "normals"-we deplorables-to follow through on the counter-revolution announced in 2015-2016, but gravely sabotaged. The continuing revolution is fierce and unrelenting; its ideology emits from a hard core of post-Marxist nihilism-in effect, anti-God and genuinely anti-human- that increasingly dominates the air waves and politics and sets the narrowing parameters for any debate, whether we acknowledge it or not.