“If only Pat Buchanan had beaten Bush for the nomination!”
“If only George Lucas had adapted the Zahn Trilogy instead of making the Special Editions!”
“If only Sega had won the fifth console generation!”
“If only Clear Channel hadn’t taken over top 40 rock radio!”
“If only they’d kept it in the bedroom!”
“If only they’d come here legally!”
If only …
Those are some of the refrains you often hear – especially from members of Gen Y in the throes of nostalgia and Zoomers who weren’t there – that all amount to the same crie de coeur:
“If only we could go back to the 90s!”
It sounds understandable at first. After all, the 1990s – the first half, anyway – were measurably better than Current Year Clown World.
But under the veneer of pining for better times lies a kind of shortsightedness that plagues online dissidents.
Because when you look at the chain of causation, the 1990s wasn’t a golden age. It was a decade of despair.
Regular readers will already be familiar with Cultural Ground Zero, which hit in 1997.
Yet it wasn’t an isolated phenomenon that happened in a vacuum. Instead, Western civilization was inundated with multiple Ground Zero events – all of which struck in the 1990s.
Music
Authors David V. Stewart, J.D. Cowan, and I have written at length about Music Ground Zero. A perfect storm of corporate and government corruption conspired to destroy rock and roll as the dominant genre and replace it with soulless pop written by a handful of cultists.
But if you go back and take an honest listen to music from 1990-1996, before the Clear Channel takeover, you’ll find a distressing trend. @FischerKing64 made the following observation on X:
Think about it. He’s right.
Back in the 80s, you had new wave Goth bands with runny mascara singing about how miserable they were. But they made no attempt to hide their misery. The point was to share it with everybody else.
The advent of normal-looking guys writing upbeat tunes that distracted you from their black pilled lyrics was a 1990s phenomenon.
Gin Blossoms, Blind Melon, and even Pearl Jam all performed that style of happy-sounding sad songs. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Are these dirges for the end of Christendom? Laments over the hollow victory at the end of the Cold War? Gray portents of the disaster to come?
American Christianity did begin a steep decline at the start of the 90s.
Some major acts of the time did seem to be telegraphing something.
Even the super bouncy “Right Here Right Now” by Jesus Jones has melancholy undernotes, at least in retrospect. It makes several direct references to disgraced historian Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” theory, for instance.
I’m still not 100 percent sure what was going on with early 90s rock music above and beyond the obvious. I do know that a good friend recently put together two big music compilations – one from the 80s and one from the 90s. The 80s mix got me pumped and energized, while something about the 90s songs set me on edge. I can’t put my finger on it, but there it is.
Television
If 90s music was low-key subversive, the same era was when prime time TV dropped any pretense and started pushing overt degeneracy.
Devon Stack, dissident documenter of all things debauched, just released the first video in a two-part series that dredges 90s TV subversion from the memory hole. [NSFW language warning]
Watching his exposé was a weird experience, akin to what I imagine hypnotic regression must be like. Because I clearly remember turning on episodes of Married … With Children, Designing Women, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation that hit me over the head with pro-sodomy propaganda. Yet much like the whimsical melodies that masked 90s songs’ dark messages, the humor and action of those TV shows overshadow the agitprop.
It’s like a weird, specific form of amnesia.
Note that we’re not talking Ground Zero-era shows like Friends. These are series that started in the late 80s and went mask off the second the calendar turned to 1990.
Unlike with the 90s music scene, we do have a key suspect in the degeneration of early 90s television. After the Ball, a gay propaganda manual by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, exploded onto the scene in 1989. Their fellow travelers in academia and media lobbied hard to inject their poison into mainstream TV.
And it worked. Overnight, sitcoms were flooded with good looking, sounding, and acting characters who were just as normal as -if not more so than – the regular male cast members. With the sole exception that they slept with other men. Meanwhile, sci fi fans had to endure countless preachy episodes revolving around ham-fisted allegories for gay acceptance. When a member of a race that reproduced through budding got shunned for having a fling with the dashing first officer, you could bet those bigoted plant people were in for a stern lecture from the moral busybody captain.
By the way, Stack has hinted that he’s got something extra dark in store for part 2 – and it involves something that happened in 1997. Get your popcorn.
Politics
Full credit to dissident blogger the Z Man for this one.
Donald Trump may have popularized “the Swamp” as a collective epithet for our permanent managerial class. But a previous president bears most of the responsibility for creating it.
And that former president was Bill Clinton.
Before anyone comments “But there’s always been corruption in Washington!” I know. We all know.
But the kinds of official malfeasance that dominated D.C. before the early 90s tended to be garden variety bribery and graft. It was the Clintons who brought a new type of grift to town.
As the Z Man explained, Clinton ran Arkansas in Big Man political machine style. The way it works is the boss gets the biggest slice of the pie, but he makes sure everybody down the chain gets a taste. That way, not only is the guy on top corrupt, so are half of his underlings. But nobody knows who’s honest and who’s not, so everybody’s too afraid to rat on anyone else.
The Clintons brought that dirty cop dynamic to the nation’s capital in 1993. It’s continued to this day, and that’s how you get FBI agents raiding political opponents’ homes and the DOJ throwing internet pranksters in jail with zero repercussions.
It’s also why controlled opposition Conservatives always want to turn the clock back to 1998. They sound like late 90s democrats because they are. And they long for their salad days, back when Uncle Rush raked Slick Willy over the coals for fooling around with White House interns.
The trouble is that by then, it was far too late. The Decade of Despair had done its evil work.
So if we can’t rewind the clock to the 90s, how do we get out of this mess?
Going back isn’t an option.
The only way out is through.
And it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
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