While I was taking a break, my friend Conor Fitzgerald wrote a sharply observed piece for UnHerd about how the Left can’t meme, because the Left now controls the Establishment.
Meanwhile on the Left, you only need to look as far as Late Night comedy — that most embarrassing of American institutions — to see how culturally deprived it has become. Since Trump, we’ve had Stephen Colbert cavorting around with dancers dressed up as Syringes in support of vaccine mandates, and the cast of Saturday Night Live standing around the piano serenading Hilary Clinton [sic] and Robert Mueller like glassy-eyed North Koreans performing for Kim Jong Un. That’s the kind of necrotic cultural artefact the mainstream produces now; it’s no surprise they reach to steal some of frog Twitter’s evil vigour.
Perhaps some of the creative energy, or at least this nation’s iconoclastic spirit, has settled on the right or has been associated with it. Maybe it’s not fair to characterize it as on the “right” or “conservative” in any way, but a generation of anti-woke comedians like Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon, and Shane Gillis is rising with real vigor.