In my last article, I noted that we seem to be moving away from a sort of nihilism that became popular in our society for too long, and are embracing something more hopeful.
It feels like we're shaking off something imposed on us, or at the very least, something that was living well past its shelf-life. I think it's a sensation that helped get Donald Trump elected, and has really flourished in the wake of it, thanks to leadership that is unapologetically American and rejects the finger wagging cynisism that dominated our culture for so long, thanks to leftist domination on so many levels of our civilization.
Read: We're Starving for a Departure From Nihilism
And with this week's news that the TPUSA halftime show was more watched than this year's Oscars, I see the pattern repeated.
Oh, did you know the Oscars happened? I didn't until the day after.
Sunday night’s Oscars only racked up 17.86 million viewers on ABC and Hulu combined. That 9 percent drop from the 19.69 million recorded last year made the 2026 Oscars the least-viewed Academy Awards shows since 2022.
[...]
Unlike the Oscars’ floundering following, the first All-American Halftime Show, featuring artists such as Kid Rock and Lee Brice, garnered 25 million views across YouTube and Rumble.
My first reaction was laughter.
My second was an odd sense of relief. I don't just want these people to fail because many of them are stuck-up elites who think they know better than everyone else about what is and isn't good, while their bubble regularly deals in some of the greatest sins known to man, but also because Hollywood has largely become the enemy of hope and positivity.
And not just Hollywood, but the entirety of the left seems to have this issue with always looking on the bright side of life.
Everything has to be deconstructed, its flaws highlighted, and its influence shunted from our society if possible. It's been the playbook for some time now. If you wonder how Disney went from being one of the greatest examples of American ingenuity and creation to being a tired mouthpiece for a radicalism no one wants, that's part of the reason. These ideologues wormed their way into the company and began transforming it from within to be "better."
It began happening to other corporations, with the infections spreading so badly that they lost billions before the tide finally turned and the infection started getting pushed back.
And the only reason it began to lose ground is that Americans were just tired of it. We want to be patriots. We want to be exceptional. We want to be proud of our heritage. We want to be thankful for what was given to us. We want to celebrate what we've built. We want to maintain it. We want to heal it where it's hurt.
Breitbart was right when he said politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of something else, and I'd say that's the inherent goodness of Western, Judeo-Christian culture.
Award shows aren't just award shows; they're gauges on how society feels about the state of entertainment's biggest stage, and as you can see, we're dropping by the millions. The reasons are obvious.
For starters, we know that the anti-American sentiment from these people is high. Even if they pretend to love our country, they continuously promote things that are destructive to it and fight against the people doing the best for it.
But I'd also say we're tuning out because that leftist mentality of "everything is bad and we have to point it all out and act on it," which Hollywood has in spades, is old hat. We're tired of listening to the naysayers. We're sick of having our flaws highlighted as if that's the only thing there is about us as a country.
The left is still trying to desperately convince you that the United States is a bad place, built by bad people, and that you should feel guilt and shame for the blessing you have, not gratitude. I think, for a time, that kind of thinking really infected us, but now we're pushing back.
It might be my ever-persistant optimism talking here, but I really do think we're seeing a massive cultural revolution that doesn't quite look like one because it's moving slower than our modern attention-spans allow.
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