The culture war isn’t a distraction — it’s the main front



Every June for the past decade, Americans have endured the same tedious ritual. Corporations, nonprofits, and federal agencies blanketed the country in rainbow iconography to mark the beginning of Pride Month. Logos were recolored. HR departments rolled out slide decks on inclusion. Public spaces were repurposed into temples of the new state religion.

But this year feels different. Pride Month opened with a whimper. Some of the most vocal corporate evangelists dropped the celebration entirely. The cause? Conservatives finally decided to fight. Culture war became something more than a talking point — and suddenly, a chorus of “respectable” voices began warning about the dangers of winning.

The base has learned that victory is possible. Cultural power can be challenged. Political power can be used. The enemy can be made to retreat.

It’s our duty to ignore them.

The warning signs were obvious decades ago. In 1992, Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention that a culture war had already begun. If the right failed to take it seriously, he said, it would lose everything else. The GOP didn’t listen. Instead, the party obsessed over tax cuts and nation-building in the Middle East. The Moral Majority of the 1970s and ’80s was treated as a joke — something dated, embarrassing, and politically toxic. Better to focus on free markets and gun rights.

The culture war, we were told, belonged to church ladies and washed-up televangelists. The future of conservatism lay in fusing neocon economics with a libertarian live-and-let-live approach to social issues.

Pride filled the void

Nature abhors a vacuum. Turns out that if you withdraw all Christian influence from the public square, something else takes its place.

Republicans abandoned the culture war. Progressives never stopped fighting it. With almost no resistance, activist groups captured corporations, school boards, and even the military. Their “American Ramadan” took hold of the civic calendar. At first, they had to push. Over time, they no longer needed to. They’d filled these institutions with graduates trained in the new religion. Pride became doctrine.

Then they pushed too far.

The backlash didn’t start with GOP leadership or conservative media figures. Most of them ran for cover, as usual. It started with parents. LGBTQ+ activists had always targeted children, but usually with plausible deniability. Once transgender ideology reached the classroom and children began mutilating their bodies, the pretense collapsed.

Fathers watched daughters suffer concussions in girls’ sports. Mothers feared losing sons to state-mandated transitions. This wasn’t about marginal tax rates any more. This was a fight for their children’s bodies and souls — exactly the battle Buchanan predicted.

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Blaze Media Illustration

Fighting the culture war worked

Eventually, even Republican politicians took notice. Boycotts emerged. Protests followed. For the first time in decades, conservative action had teeth. Corporate boardrooms and school boards felt the pressure.

Some politicians, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, broke from the usual GOP pattern of complaint without consequence. He used political power to defend voters — passing laws, signing executive orders, reshaping public institutions. Conservative pundits and establishment media scolded him for violating “small government principles.” Voters, however, rewarded him. Other governors followed.

Pride Month 2025 looked nothing like the version Americans had come to expect. Under the Trump administration, federal agencies and the military no longer served as public relations arms for the gender revolution. Major corporations — Target, Starbucks, Disney — sat out the ritual queering of their logos. Not every company pulled back. But the most aggressive push came from professional sports leagues, especially Major League Baseball. Ironically, the industries most reliant on red-state consumers seemed the most desperate to humiliate them.

Still, the contrast was undeniable. Conservatives, for once, applied sustained pressure — and it worked.

Much work to be done

No victory stays secure without follow-through.

Progressive ideology still saturates the commanding heights of American culture. The bureaucracy, the universities, the legal system — all remain firmly in enemy hands. Populist uprisings, however welcome, tend to burn hot and fast. They need structure to last. The moment belongs to the right, but momentum means little without organization.

Buchanan’s most famous lines weren’t just about warning — they were about action.

Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.

That vision threatens the GOP establishment more than any left-wing pressure campaign. Republican elites never liked Trump, and they certainly never liked what he unleashed. Populism made demands. It refused to obey. It reminded the base that political power should be used — not just harvested.

The saboteurs wasted no time. They labeled anyone who fights the culture war with actual authority “the woke right.” The term signals their intent: Neutralize real opposition by redefining it as leftist. Restore the old consensus. Return to safe topics and stale slogans.

But the old consensus is dying.

The base has learned that victory is possible. Cultural power can be challenged. Political power can be used. The enemy can be made to retreat.

Of course, this fight won’t end quickly. No amount of virtue-signaling from corporations can erase the damage already done. Children still face ideological capture. Bureaucrats still push gender ideology behind closed doors. Activists still hold positions of influence across major institutions.

But the wall has cracked.

This moment demands more than nostalgia or outrage. It demands strategy. It demands organization. And above all, it demands courage.

The right doesn’t need to beg for permission or apologize for fighting. It needs to press the advantage. Those who warned that the culture war would cost too much should reckon with how much surrender has already cost us.

We’ve seen what works. Now we need to keep doing it — block by block.

Pete Rose still might never get inducted into the Hall of Fame. Here's why.



There may be hurdles in front of Pete Rose's possible induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, even though Major League Baseball recently reinstated the legendary player.

Rose had been banned from baseball — and Hall of Fame eligibility — because he gambled on MLB games, but commissioner Robert D. Manfred Jr. declared earlier this week that permanent ineligibility "ends upon the passing of the disciplined individual."

'They take violations very seriously. Joe Jackson fixed games. OK? Pete Rose bet on games as a manager of one team. That doesn't go away.'

The decision affected 17 individuals — all of them players except for William Cox, a former owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, who was banned for betting on his team's games.

The most famous examples among the 17 are "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, who died in 1951, and Rose, who died in 2024. Jackson was banned due to his part in the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919, while Rose was shut out in 1989.

RELATED: Pete Rose reinstated as eligible for Hall of Fame — but new rule will revive MLB's darkest era

While much of the commotion has surrounded the possibly of Rose being enshrined into the Hall of Fame after decades, it would not exactly be a walk in the park to get the former Cincinnati Red and Phillies phenom on a plaque.

The problems start to emerge when factoring in that Rose's eligibility period originally was from 1992 to 2006, according to the Associated Press.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has been accused of blocking Pete Rose's eligibility.Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Fortune Media

Rose garnered 41 write-in votes in 1992 and was written in on 243 more ballots over the next 15 years, but those votes did not count.

What's more, now that the ban has been lifted, both Rose and Jackson are eligible only for the Hall of Fame's Classic Baseball Era — and that requires a rigorous process prior to enshrinement in Cooperstown.

Jane Forbes Clark, who chairs the Hall of Fame board, told ESPN the first step will be a 10-person Historical Overview Committee that selects eight ballot candidates to present to the Classic Baseball Era Committee.

Who is on the committees?

While the identities of current members of the Historical Overview Committee are not known, they are assumed to be veteran members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Longtime sports broadcaster Tony Kornheiser knows how that goes.

"The baseball writers who are members put you in the Hall of Fame. Those baseball writers, as we know well, are guardians of the game," Kornheiser said on his show, "Pardon the Interruption."

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Kornheiser added, "They take violations very seriously. Joe Jackson fixed games. OK? Pete Rose bet on games as a manager of one team. That doesn't go away."

'Shoeless' Joe JacksonPhoto by Sporting News via Getty Images/Sporting News via Getty Images via Getty Images

If Rose and Jackson pass muster with the Historical Overview Committee, their names would be sent to the Classic Baseball Era Committee to vote at its next meeting.

Members of the Classic Baseball Era Committee presently include Hall of Fame players — icons such as Paul Molitor and Ozzie Smith, per ESPN. Jackson and Rose would need 12 votes from the 16-person Classic Baseball Era Committee to get into the Hall of Fame.

Another hurdle is the fact that it would take years for this process to play out. The Classic Baseball Era Committee, according to Clark, does not meet until December 2027. At that point, an entirely new committee could be in place — and who knows how they would view Rose and Jackson.

'It essentially comes down to whether the committees think gambling is worse than using human-growth hormones or steroids.'

Given that the MLB writers have excluded from the Hall of Fame some of the most successful players of all time — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, and Alex Rodriguez, for example — potential inductions of players like Jackson and Rose may come down to where committee members draw their ethical lines.

"It essentially comes down to whether the committees think gambling is worse than using human-growth hormones or steroids," said Dave Shrigley, a writer and editor for Rebel News.

Shrigley told Blaze News, "Steroids weren't exactly banned by the league, so not only is there an ethical question, but there's also the question as to what is actually a ban-worthy offense."

Commissioner Manfred slightly touched on this topic in 2020 when he said Rose "violated what is sort of Rule One in baseball," adding that the MLB would continue "to abide by [its] own rules."

Some have criticized Manfred in the past for stonewalling Rose's possible induction, including in 2015 when he denied Rose's application for reinstatement.

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