It wasn’t that long ago that America’s strongest and most important export was American culture and the global dissemination of the American Dream. From movies to music, from blue jeans to drive-in movies, and from fast food to fashion, there wasn’t a single country in the world or a single cohort of teenagers and young adults that didn’t want what America was offering. 

Unfortunately, throughout the progression of the Vietnam War, American culture started to cannibalize itself. The anti-war, hippie, and protesting counterculture took the reins. American cultural institutions and artists pivoted away from patriotism and moved toward anti-Establishment and anti-Western positions for a variety of reasons, both ideological and financial. 

Protest became the foundational position of a generation of artists, musicians, and thinkers. As a result, America’s most powerful civil export was completely defenestrated. The left took ownership of American culture and rebellion. And since then, the American left has adopted an increasingly aggressive and metastasizing woke ideology. The result has been the near complete ideological capture of most of American civil society. 

Undeniably, there has been a near ideological capture of public education, public health administration (as evidenced by the Covid years), the legacy media, and the judiciary to name a few spheres of DEI influence. Woke ideology has arguably been the most noxious and dangerous export that America has ever sent out into the world and it didn’t seem like there was an end in sight.