It seems to me that being “cool” just isn’t what it used to be in today’s media-saturated, globalized, and censorious age. 

It is difficult to be a mysterious rebel when cell phone cameras and internet uploads turn every slouching attempt to share ineluctable life truths into a frantic and demeaning fight for attention. If you cannot garner more attention than a video clip of a cat with the “zoomies” or a baby befuddled by their first taste of peppermint, you’re just somebody trying to fake your way into notoriety, which immediately transforms you into a social media clown. Cool can only thrive in the limiting shadows, and the withering spotlight of 24/7 access turns everyone into just another overeager parvenu. 

Our globalized entertainment marketplace also robs coolness of its intrinsically local and uniquely individual character. If the French chanteuse Edith Piaf were recording her signature song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” today, she would be compelled to re-record it in Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and English for distribution to a worldwide audience, and the magic of putting her scratchy record on a turntable would be erased by the sterility of a streaming download. Ease of access translates in any language into “this is a homogenized commodity”, and the magic of an accidental, life-altering discovery of a book, movie, musician, or artist is made impossible by the planetary reality of Google, Google, and more Google. Our world has shrunk—and shriveled.

Finally, being a rebel isn’t quite as much fun when influencers, consultants, and marketers now define what rebellion should be—and what you must believe if you are a “rebel”. It often turns out that what is really being sold is a stilted and narrow Cultural Marxist conformity to norms of so-called “tolerance and diversity” that are actually an intellectual straitjacket that is the required uniform of a joyless cult that brooks no deviation from the required path of insufferable identity politics, self-righteous victimization, and a clueless rejection of reality. 

Our oppressive intellectual monoculture isn’t producing cool and challenging free thinkers; we are, instead, using all the powers of government, academia, and the mass media to produce obedient, pitiable drones who are taught to shun and shame those who might question a suicidal national path that excuses criminality, celebrates immorality, and embraces banality. Rebellion that serves the interests of those with power, money—and a plan to stamp out any actual rebellion against their hateful attempts to subjugate America—isn’t really much of a rebellion at all because marching under the banners supplied by your overlords is simply self-satisfied theatricality and whining pleas for attention. You cannot break the mold if you willingly stuff yourself into it as a means of avoiding necessary self-examination and self-knowledge.

Being cool means cutting your own path, making up your own mind, and being able to stand tall against the prevailing winds of groupthink and twisted idolatry. Fitting in and following along holds no interest for the truly cool, which makes them very different from the fakers who are desperate for the attention and validation that comes from seeming to be cool by following the herd. You cannot be cool if you are desperately trying to be cool—by spewing the nonsense you heard on TikTok.

Perhaps, truth be told, it is much more difficult to be cool today because the cost of individuality is simply too high in a surveillance society that brutally censors free speech and unapproved thought. The nail that sticks up too obviously is, so the saying goes, the one that will be ruthlessly hammered down. Given that your life can now be ruined for daring to question the extravagantly expensive eco-terrorism that runs under the bland label of climate policy or criticizing the child abusers who provide so-called gender affirming care, joining in the Woke cheers for all manner of depravity and stupidity might be a smart survival mechanism. Silence might not be cool, but it may be necessary because many of those with power today are as crazy as a big bag full of cats.

We must, to be fair, remember that in any society throughout the course of history, the vast majority of citizens will be more than content to run with the herd, finding comfort and security in fitting in rather than standing out. Our progress—whether it be social, cultural, spiritual, economic, artistic, scientific, military, or political—is dependent on at least some not being content to exist within the constraints dictated by those around them.

This is not to say, of course, that nonconformity is always either helpful or healthy. There are plenty of psychopaths, sociopaths, and otherwise mentally unhealthy (or perhaps simply immature) individuals walking the planet, and we must carefully consider whether certain behaviors and ideas are nothing other than the damaging manifestations of troubled minds that have slipped their moorings.

For every Galileo there will be a Genghis Khan; for every brilliant doctor, there is likely a heartless murderer. The fine but distinct line between being controversial and crazy is often apparent only after many years have passed, so it is human nature to give new ideas, even those that seem nonsensical, the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, this polite credulity can easily cross the line into enabling the adoption of beliefs that harm individuals and degrade our nation, and this is especially true when the tools of mass indoctrination have never been as powerful or omnipresent as they are today.

It is also possible that being cool demonstrates the clear difference between being intelligent and being obedient. Those who find comfort in compliance with even the most outrageously illogical mandates of today’s totalitarian Left—repeated Covid-19 jabs, sexualizing children, eating bugs instead of meat, decriminalizing dangerous drugs, erasing our country’s borders, abandoning meritocracy, sorting us by shades of color, denigrating traditional families, refusing to recognize the biological differences between men and woman while shaming boys and men for being (wait for it) boys and men, bludgeoning hard working Americans with more taxes and endless regulations, making lives easier for criminals whenever possible, endangering women by insisting biological men must be invited into their personal spaces, and spending trillions of borrowed dollars on unreliable green energy projects—are often the sad spawn of college liberal arts programs that have taught them to reject free thinking and shun ideas that contradict their hateful opinions about America and Americans. 

Never in any nation’s history has so much time and money been spent convincing its citizens to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. Perhaps the single best proof of this fact is the stunning 33% of viewers who, according to a poll right after the Trump-Biden Presidential Debate, firmly asserted that sleepy, stumbling, senescent Joe “won” in spite of displaying all the charisma of The Crypt Keeper. If ever one needed clear evidence that decades of educational and mass media indoctrination has dulled the critical thinking skills of tens of millions of people in our troubled nation, this was it. The difference between those who are Woke and those who are Awake will determine whether our nation can escape the grim and mounting toll of decades of Social Justice sophistries that have brought our great country to the edge of ruin.

It would be cool if Americans could immediately stop acting like brain dead sheep and rise up to right our ship of state, and we would all be far better off if rebellion against today’s dysfunctional status quo resulted in a total rejection of the widespread insanity that has defined our culture for decades.

Unfortunately, the harsh fact is that we are in a war for the soul of our nation—and it is far from certain who will