A lot of folks have tried to figure out exactly why the Donald Trump phenomenon happened.
Donald Trump has been the most transformative political figure of the 21st century. Without a doubt, it was going to be Barack Obama. And then Trump came in and completely remade American politics in global geopolitics.
But what led to the Trump phenomenon in the first place? There have been a lot of attempts to philosophize about Trump. Maybe it was all about economic grievances in the Midwest? Maybe it was all about offshoring? Maybe it was all about tariffs or about immigration?
The reality is the biggest thing that drove Donald Trump to victory in 2016 and again in 2024 is the fact that the Left went culturally insane.
The backlash against the Left has been less about tax rates than about a generalized feeling that the Left was trying to dissolve the culture of the United States on traditional, basic issues such as “men are not women.” Or “There is such a thing as America, and America is good.” Or, “Christianity ought to be held with a high level of esteem.”
These are certain things Americans took for granted. Things like church, apple pie, baseball, the flag, all the stuff people used to think was corny.
And then the Left decided, they weren’t just corny, they were bad.
But it turns out most Americans don’t think like that.
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Why do I bring this up? Because you’re seeing all of this crystallized in what I would term a culture division between the Sydney Sweeney Americans and the Cynthia Erivo Americans.
Cynthia Erivo, whom I’ve praised before, is a terrific actress from Great Britain, a great singer, and unbelievably talented. But Cynthia Erivo has also become emblematic of a leftist social value belief system.
This became a hot issue online over the course of the last 48 hours, because she was the star of a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Jesus Christ Superstar, as a musical, is quite respectful to Christian traditions. It is not meant to make fun of Christian traditions.
But at the Hollywood Bowl, they decided they were going to cast Cynthia Erivo as Jesus Christ.
There are a few problems with this: Cynthia Erivo is a woman; Jesus Christ was a man. Cynthia Erivo is black; Jesus Christ was a Middle-Eastern Jew. Cynthia Erivo describes herself as queer and bisexual. Jesus Christ was not, to say the least, any of that.
So they took all the things that Jesus Christ was not, and morphed them into what the Left wishes Jesus Christ were. The whole goal of this production at the Hollywood Bowl was to be completely subversive of Christianity, and to supplant traditional values with the values of the far-Left social sphere.
Theater critic Charles McNulty’s gushing review in the L.A. Times stated:
Cynthia Erivo, a noted theatrical divinity, redeemed the title of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl last weekend in a magnetic, heaven-sent performance that established God the Savior as a queer Black woman, as many of us suspected might be the case all along. Divine dispensation allowed me to catch the final performance of this revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1971 breakout musical. I returned from vacation just in time to join the pilgrimaging hordes carting cumbersome picnic baskets and enough wine for a few dozen Sicilian weddings. The vast number of attendees caused bottlenecks at entry points, prompting one wag to crack, “What is this, the Second Coming?
Notice all of the extraordinarily seething comments of hatred for Christianity just in the first two paragraphs. “God the Savior as a queer Black woman, as many of us suspected might be the case all along.” That everyone suspected all along that God the Savior was a “queer black woman.” Erivo is a “theatrical divinity.” It was only “divine dispensation” and the favor of God that caused him to catch this performance of Cynthia Erivo.
“The headliners, Erivo as Jesus and Adam Lambert as Judas, certainly have sizable fan bases,” he continued. “But so too does the subject of this Greatest Story Ever Told, a messiah whose following has few equals in the history of the world. Suffice it to say, it was a supercharged evening, comparable more to a rock concert than one of the Bowl’s forays into the musical theater past.”
He goes on to talk about Cynthia Erivo and the magic of a queer black woman playing Jesus and Adam Lambert, who is openly gay, playing Judas, adding, “Phillipa Soo’s Mary Magdalene brought a probing, tentative and profound intimacy in her adoration of Erivo’s Jesus. In her exquisite rendition of ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him,’ the tenderness between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, at once earthy and ethereal, deepened the expressive range of the love between them.”
The whole idea from the Left is that the entire story of Christianity must be flipped on its head. The imagery that emerges from this performance of JC Superstar is astonishingly hedonistic, truly subversive. That is the entire goal of the enterprise.
I’m not a Christian, but I have great respect for Christianity. I’ve encouraged tens of thousands of people to go back to church and many, many people to move back toward their belief system.
Do these performances sound like Jesus and Judas to you, or do they sound like a queer, bisexual black woman and a very, very gay man cosplaying as Jesus and Judas?
The reason that’s important is because the backlash is one of the things driving America’s politics right now. The backlash to the left-wing view that everything must be subverted; the church must be subverted; Christianity must be subverted; heterosexuality must be subverted; whiteness must be subverted. All of these things “must be subverted because they are all emblematic of an evil system of power.”
That is why when Donald Trump said “Make America Great Again,” all he really meant by that was “Stop this stuff. Stop this crap.”
Donald Trump represented a giant, pulsating orange middle finger to all of this nonsense.
On the one side, you have Jesus Christ played by Cynthia Erivo, and on the other side, you have the cultural controversy surrounding Sydney Sweeney.
Sydney Sweeney is all-American, and a throwback to every cheesecake star of the 1940s. She’s the kind of woman who was painted on the front of World War II bombers, and so she looks like a pinup girl from 1944. She grew up in rural areas like Spokane, Washington, and her values reflect that. When she moved to Florida, she registered as a Republican.
There’s nothing in Hollywood that gets people’s goat more than being a registered Republican.
But Sydney Sweeney being a Republican shouldn’t be that big a deal, right? In a country that is at least 50% Republican at this point, why shouldn’t Sydney Sweeney, who is now a popular actress and advertising icon, be a registered Republican?
When you look at Sydney Sweeney, obviously, she’s a beautiful woman. But there are lots of beautiful young women in Hollywood. What is it about Sydney Sweeney that drove the Left insane?
Sydney Sweeney is not one of them.
It’s not just that the Left wishes to uphold the values and rights of the marginalized. They wish to recenter the marginalized and to turn the mainstream, the “normies,” into the marginalized.
Thus, they must attack anyone who is not one of them.
This is why, for years, every couple of weeks on Twitter, Chris Pratt would randomly trend. That was because Chris Pratt is not of the Left. It doesn’t mean that he’s a rabid Right-winger, but because Chris Pratt was not openly saying all of the idiotic nostrums of the Left, from BLM to LGBTQ+-, that made him verboten.
The same thing happened to Sydney Sweeney.
But it’s now backfiring because Americans have had enough of this crap.
The backlash against Sweeney says that the actual realities of life must be Cynthia Erivo as Jesus Christ and Sydney Sweeney as a Nazi. But the backlash against Sydney Sweeney for being a pretty blonde white girl with blue eyes who can shoot a gun and isn’t a registered Democrat is the reason that Donald Trump is president.
If that’s going to be the juxtaposition Democrats and the Left make, they will lose until the end of time.
And they will deserve it.
