Last week I wrote about how we’re in a cultural civil war and it’s time for conservatives—and really, anyone who’s not on board with the radical anti-American agenda of Black Lives Matter and the rest of the woke left—to fight back.
But how? I was light on specifics, and subsequently heard from a number of readers who wanted to know what they could do, personally, to push back against the leftward lurch of the culture. Many said they feel powerless and overwhelmed, and with good reason.
Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, the mainstream media, corporate America, and the entire Democratic Party (along with not a few Republicans and Independents) have all caved under pressure from the woke mob, more or less accepting the premise that America is fundamentally a racist country and an evil empire whose system of government and institutions need to be torn down.
In the face of all this, what are ordinary Americans who reject this radical view—and who represent a large majority of the country—supposed to do? Below I’ve listed a few ideas. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list, not even close, but a starting point to begin thinking about how to re-order our lives, from our spending habits to our entertainment choices to our social activities, in a way that weakens support, even passive support, for institutions that embrace leftist radicalism.
1. Choose and Fund Alternatives to Public Schools
This is the big one. The problem of public schools of course deserves many columns and books—and has them—but you can’t leave it off any list of how to fight back. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for the woke left.
Just look at the hordes of college-educated protesters screaming Marxist nonsense at the police. What they learned in college has trickled down into our middle and high schools, even some of our elementary schools. Arguably the number one thing conservatives can do to preserve our constitutional system and save the republic is to educate their kids anywhere but in public school.
Obviously, not everyone can afford private school, and not everyone is able to home school. But now is the time to start thinking hard about educational alternatives.
Churches that don’t have a school need to explore what it would take to start one, or maybe a homeschool-private school hybrid. Parents should re-evaluate their finances and figure out whether other options might be possible, even if that means drastically cutting other spending or reducing income because one parent educates the kids.
All conservatives, whether you have kids or not, should donate to private schools that teach the virtues of the American Founding. All conservatives should make school choice a top policy item when election season comes around, and ask local and state political candidates about it. All conservatives should get involved in expanding educational alternatives of every kind. The future of the republic depends on it.
2. Shift Your Spending Away from Corporations that Hate You, Like Amazon
If you’re a conservative, understand that Amazon hates you (but loves communist China). Also understand that you don’t have to buy everything on Amazon.
That new can opener or garden hose you so desperately need? You can order pretty much whatever you need from Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and so on. Many of these places will even deliver to your doorstep.
Will you pay a little more for it? Maybe. Will it come in three or four days instead of tomorrow? Yes. But if you can’t bear that miniscule inconvenience for the sake of your principles, then you don’t deserve America.
And if you don’t want to shop at big box stores like Walmart, there are plenty of other online retailer alternatives to Amazon like Ebay, Overstock, Rakuten, Newegg, Zappos, and many others. The internet is a big place. Get out there.
Or you can go directly to a specific retailer’s website. Need a tent or a sleeping bag? Buy it directly from REI or Cabela’s. Need a book? Try Barnes & Noble—or better yet, find a local bookstore to support. If they don’t have what you want in stock, ask them to order it. You might have to wait a week like they did in the olden days, but you can use the extra time to re-read a favorite book, or take more walks, or literally do anything except buy stuff on Amazon.
3. In Fact, Just Stop Using Jeff Bezos’ Platforms Altogether
Speaking of Amazon, news broke Monday that streaming giant Twitch temporarily banned President Trump from its platform because of the president’s recent remarks at the Tulsa rally, which violated Twitch’s policy against “hateful conduct.”
Twitch is by far the world’s largest video game streaming platform. It’s practically a live-streaming monopoly. It’s also chock full of actually hateful content far worse than anything Trump said in Tulsa. Amazon acquired it in 2014 for a billion dollars.
If you’re tired of monopolistic tech firms arbitrarily banning major public figures from their platforms for speech they don’t like, and you use Twitch, then find another streaming platform like Mixer or YouTube Gaming. (But maybe just stop streaming video games altogether?)
4. Google Also Hates You, So Stop Using It
If things like privacy and free speech are important to you, you might want to rethink how much you rely on Google products and companies. Gmail, for example, tracks your purchasing history from the receipts in your Gmail inbox. YouTube, which is wholly owned by Google, routinely censors conservative content under the guise that it’s “hate speech.”
Google of course has all kinds of double standards for conservatives. Earlier this month Google threatened to pull ads from The Federalist—not for anything we wrote, but for our comments section, which—you guessed it—violated their guidelines on hate speech. (The irony is that the comments section of YouTube is one of the most vile, hateful places on the internet.)
Also, you don’t have to Google everything. You can use Bing, Yahoo!, Searx, Qwant, DuckDuckGo, or any of the many other search engines out there. And you don’t have to use other Google products, like Gmail. There are a host of alternatives to Gmail, which honestly doesn’t even work that well. So get creative about not relying on Google for every little thing you do online.
5. Stop Using Facebook and Instagram
There are other ways to share photos of your cat with old high school classmates. Or maybe not, but so what? Facebook has a habit of banning people and groups who say things woke Facebook employees don’t like. Just this week the social media giant made headlines by banning hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with the so-called boogaloo movement, which Facebook says promotes “violence against civilians, law enforcement, and government officials and institutions.”
You might think that means Facebook will also be banning accounts associated with Antifa, which also promotes and carries out violence against civilians and law enforcement, but you’d be wrong. That’s not how this works. Facebook did, however, ban a Trump campaign ad attacking Antifa on the absurd pretext that an Antifa symbol used in the ad was actually a Nazi symbol.
This kind of double standard is commonplace at Facebook. Another example: back in April, Facebook banned a bunch of users from organizing “events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing.” So no using Facebook to organize lockdown protests. You might therefore assume Facebook would also ban users from organizing Black Lives Matter protests that defy government’s guidance on social distancing, but again, you’d be wrong.
Seemingly Small Things Matter
These all might seem like small things, to stop using Amazon and Google and Facebook, or to start advocating for school choice, or to patronize local businesses over giant corporations. But we have to start somewhere. Calling your local elected officials and demanding they enforce the law and arrest rioters is all well and good, but often those local officials don’t care what you say because they’re more afraid of the mob than they are of law-abiding conservatives.
So we begin with small things, and we build. The left didn’t take over American mainstream culture overnight, and taking it back won’t happen overnight. But we have to begin, now, each of us in our own private lives, in all our small choices. No one is going to save the republic for us, so let’s get started.
Oh, and one more thing you can do—fly an American flag in your yard this Fourth of July.